Allegis Group

Managing Executive Expectations

Allegis Group is an international staffing and services company consisting of eight operating companies. Working directly with presidents and CFO’s of these organizations, the meetings team has a unique responsibility to provide clear insights into their meeting spend, budgetary compliance, and the value of events overall.

The team at Allegis Group needed a way to effectively manage the meeting request process for the organization. “We’re in the Finance world, which is very unique for meeting planners,” explains Meeting Planner Melissa McGowen. “We have a lot of pressure being able to talk about our budgets and what we’re spending, really being the guiders for the CFO’s and presidents. We need to be able to show them the value of our team.” The meetings team needed to better capture all meetings, trainings, and incentive programs for increased executive visibility.

The team originally used Excel to track their spend, doing a line-by-line audit to ensure financial accuracy. Melissa notes, “When I started, we were using Cvent for our fee sourcing, awarding, and registration. We kept having leaders and CFO’s reach out to ask what our budget spend was. We were having to ramble through Excel documents to figure it out.” They had no way to show total spend by Operating Company, year, or any other financial lens. “We were really having to think, how are we going to show them our financial input for year over year comparison?” she recalls. Melissa’s team knew they needed a technology solution to reduce their workload and meet executive expectations.

“Being in my role, never did I think I’d be sitting in a room with the CFO. I’m able to show him what I’ve created with the financial dashboard and what else I want to bring to the table.”

Melissa McGowen, Meeting Planner

Building a Tech Stack for Financial Success

Using Cvent’s Event Management solution, they built over 300 registration sites in 2017. In addition, the team adopted new Cvent technology to capture accurate spend and provide on-demand reports. “When we attended Cvent CONNECT in 2014, we decided to adopt the Budget Module. It’s the best thing we’ve ever done,” Melissa says. Working with Cvent and a dedicated financial analyst, the team created a Meetings Dashboard. They captured budgets for all 732 events sourced, ensuring 100% accuracy in the SMM process. The dashboard effectively captured all spend by Operating Company, top ten vendors, cost savings, average room rate, and comparison to the previous year.

“It gives us the ability to present a financial dashboard to the stakeholders, as well as show year over year comparison for each program,” Melissa notes. The team was even able to catch an impressive $70,000 error because of their use of Cvent. She adds, “We saved a lot of time using the Budget Module. Every personality for every stakeholder is different. If needed, you can go right back into Cvent and pull the report. It takes five minutes, but to them, you look like a hero.”