Background
From 2 hours to 10 minutes: how Soup Agency automated client reporting and freed its team for valuable work
Built to serve the clients big agencies ignored. Katya Vakulenko founded Soup Agency after years of working within large agencies, where tier-one clients got the best strategy while everyone else settled for less. Katya saw an opportunity: deliver the same level of expertise and execution to small and mid-sized businesses. She launched her own business in 2019, and now Soup Agency is a full-service digital agency working across paid social, search, email, and SEO.
The Challenge
Two to three hours per report.
Before Swydo, Soup Agency ran its reporting in Excel. Every reporting cycle meant pulling data from each platform by hand, formatting it, building tables, and checking it for errors — then spending at least another hour each month to refresh it. For a full-service agency with multiple clients, that time added up fast. The process was time-consuming, error-prone, and added no value to clients whatsoever.
Data wrangling took up too much time.
For a full-service agency running campaigns across Facebook, Google, email, and CRM, the volume of data was significant. Pulling ad creative previews meant taking screenshots by hand and adding numbers next to them, one client at a time. When something changed in the data, the team first checked whether the numbers were even correct, rather than asking why.
One platform that connected the whole picture.
Soup Agency evaluated Dashthis and at least one other platform before choosing Swydo. The others felt clunky, required more setup time, and didn’t cover the full range of integrations a full-service agency needs. Swydo stood out for two reasons: it connected all of Soup Agency’s channels in one place, and it was genuinely intuitive. The team could quickly learn the basics and get started, no lengthy training required.
Up and running without hand-holding.
The Soup Agency team set everything up themselves during a trial period, building their own templates and connecting their accounts. Katya puts it this way: the platform is intuitive enough that you can get started without formal onboarding.
When they’ve hit issues — a connection dropping after a platform update, for example — the Swydo support team has been quick to respond.
“At least 50% of reporting time was going into actual data management and extraction. That has been completely removed. Now the team spends that time looking at insights — what has happened, what do we need to do next month, putting together recommendations for the client.”
Katya Vakulenko,
Founder, Soup Agency
What Changed
40 hours a month handed back to strategy.
A report that used to take 2–3 hours to build in Excel, plus at least an hour a month to refresh, now takes under 10 minutes in Swydo. Across the team and clients, Katya estimates total savings of over 40 hours per month.
Better analysis, not just faster reports.
The time saving is only part of the story. Katya has clearly seen an improvement in quality, too. With data pulling automatically and reliably, the team no longer spends time checking whether numbers are correct, they go straight to understanding why something changed. The result is sharper analysis and stronger recommendations. As Katya puts it, the team now has more time to spend on what matters most to clients.
Reports clients can share with their leadership teams.
Swydo’s shareable dashboard links go to every client at Soup Agency. Clients can check performance across all channels at any time, adjust date ranges, and review results without waiting for the monthly report. Katya notes that clients often share these internally with their own management and leadership teams. To make that possible, Soup Agency has built a glossary into the reports, so executives without a digital marketing background can follow along. For quarterly business reviews, the team pulls Swydo’s graphs directly into their presentation decks.
Clients ask to see the creative data.
Katya names ad creative previews as her favorite feature, and clients have noticed it too. Soup Agency has had clients specifically ask to see examples of a Swydo report or dashboard, drawn in by the ability to break down creative performance visually. In Excel, that meant taking screenshots by hand and placing them manually. In Swydo, creative insights from Meta pull in automatically — clean, visual, and immediately readable, with no manual work.
Reporting that wins pitches and onboards clients in 10 minutes.
When Soup Agency pitches, reporting comes up as a consideration for several prospects. Katya’s team walks them through Swydo, showing the platform, the real-time dashboard, and the transparency they’ll have from day one. It’s a genuine point of difference. And once a client signs, onboarding their reporting takes 10 minutes, down from 2–3 hours in Excel. New clients are in and reporting from day one.
Adding more value for clients.
Since switching to Swydo over 4 years ago, Soup Agency’s reporting infrastructure scales automatically. New clients connect to existing templates in minutes, and the time saved across the agency means the team can focus on higher-value tasks like insights, strategy, and testing. Katya recommends Swydo to agency peers without hesitation. She sees it as equally valuable for in-house marketing teams and franchise organizations that need to deliver local-area reports at scale.