How Happy Friday Reduced Admin Time by 30% with Magnetic

About Happy Friday 

Happy Friday Creative is a full-service creative agency based in Cape Town, South Africa. Known for its bold campaigns, strategic thinking, and collaborative culture, the agency works across a wide range of industries to deliver everything from brand campaigns to tactical activations. 

With a team of designers, writers, strategists, and project managers, Happy Friday thrives in an environment where deadlines are tight, briefs shift frequently, and operational efficiency is critical to client satisfaction. But as the agency expanded, it became clear that legacy processes, especially around resourcing, task tracking, and reporting were holding the team back. 

The Challenge: Growing Complexity Without the Right Tools 

As Happy Friday’s client base and campaign load grew, so did the operational strain on its internal systems. Key pain points began to surface: 

• Limited visibility into capacity: The team had no clear, real-time view of who was available to take on work or how team members were being allocated across jobs. ‍
• Siloed communication and collaboration: When multiple resources worked on a task, there was no shared space to view comments, track status, or manage billing- leading to duplication and confusion. ‍
• Manual time tracking and reconciliation: Hours were logged inconsistently across spreadsheets or via manual entry, making it difficult to track profitability, generate reports, or conduct accurate billing. ‍
• Increased admin burden: As projects became more complex, operational staff were spending more time chasing updates, checking timelines, and managing resourcing manually, slowing down delivery and impacting team efficiency. 

“Time tracking had always been a challenge for us,” explains Sarah Slater, Operations Director. “And we were constantly having to duplicate tasks just to get the right people assigned at the right rates. It was time-consuming and prone to error.” 

Happy Friday needed a project management platform that could not only centralise planning and collaboration, but also support the nuances of agency operations, like tracking multiple resources per task, aligning to rate cards, and offering flexible ways to log time. 

The Solution: An Intuitive Platform Built for Creative Operations 

After revisiting the market and reassessing needs, Happy Friday made the decision to re-adopt Magnetic, a platform they had used previously but now offered enhanced functionality and smarter workflows. 

Magnetic stood out for several reasons: 

• Multi-resource task management: Magnetic allows multiple team members to be assigned to a single task, each with their own allocated time and billing rate. This eliminated the need to create separate tasks for every contributor and drastically reduced duplication. ‍
• Centralized briefs and comment threads: Everyone working on a task could now access the same information, reducing confusion and back-and-forth communication. ‍
• Dynamic scheduling with real-time visibility: The newly updated Team Scheduler provided a clear view of daily and weekly capacity, making it easier to prioritize urgent work and avoid overload. ‍
• Flexible time tracking methods: Team members could log time in multiple ways, via timesheets, task-level logging, or pre-assigned time entries, making it easier to adopt and maintain tracking discipline. ‍
• Support for both Agile and Waterfall workflows: Whether planning a large-scale campaign or responding to a quick-turnaround client request, Magnetic offered the right level of structure and flexibility. 

Implementation: Smooth Rollout With Custom Support 

While any platform implementation comes with some upfront effort, Happy Friday found the process to be structured, supportive, and tailored to their needs. 

Working closely with the Magnetic team, they: 

• Migrated key historical project and time data 
• Customised the job and task structures to reflect their agency workflow 
• Set up billing rates and resource profiles to align with their financial processes 
• Trained the full team on platform use, including task creation, time logging, and using the scheduler 

Magnetic’s support didn’t end after setup. Ongoing ticketing support, knowledge base resources, and a feedback-driven development roadmap meant the team always had access to the help and improvements they needed. 

The Results: 30% Less Admin, Clearer Capacity, and Stronger Time Discipline 

Since embedding Magnetic into their day-to-day operations, Happy Friday has seen measurable and meaningful improvements across several areas: 

Efficiency Gains 

• 30% reduction in admin time, particularly around task creation, time recon, and team coordination 
• Fewer duplicated tasks, with one central place to assign, brief, and track multiple contributors 
• Faster prioritisation, especially for urgent work, with real-time visibility into team availability 

Better Scheduling & Resourcing 

• Improved clarity into team workloads, helping the ops team avoid burnout and plan proactively 
• Smarter decision-making on project timelines and scope based on accurate capacity data 
• More responsive resource allocation, with the ability to quickly shift assignments as new work comes in 

Time Tracking Adoption 

• Increased accuracy in time logging, thanks to task-level time allocations and automatic schedule syncing 
• Simplified timesheet submissions, reducing friction and boosting team compliance 
• Stronger data foundation for job costing, billing, and internal reporting 

Would You Recommend Magnetic? 

Magnetic has helped us cut our admin time by 30%, streamline time tracking, and improve how we plan and prioritise work. It’s intuitive, flexible, and keeps getting better. I’d absolutely recommend it to other agencies.”  Sarah Slater, Operations Director, Happy Friday 

Looking Ahead: Scaling with Confidence 

With Magnetic now central to their daily operations, Happy Friday is confident they have the tools - and the habits - to scale more sustainably. The team continues to explore how Magnetic’s evolving feature set can support deeper reporting, smarter forecasting, and more seamless collaboration across teams. 

As the agency grows, Happy Friday now has the structure and visibility to manage work more proactively - without adding complexity.

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