How Bogdanova Bureau Grew Revenue 173% by Treating Finance Like Design
“$7 per month becomes $90 per year. And it's not just one tool. In Finmap this is tracked brilliantly — you see exactly where your budget goes.”
— Olha Bogdanova, founder of Bogdanova Bureau
Challenge
Bogdanova Bureau designs holistic living spaces for private and commercial clients — architecture, interiors, product design, and art direction — under founder Olha Bogdanova, who split off from a larger architecture firm to start the studio in 2018.
Project-based creative businesses have a specific financial blind spot: on a short job, it's easy to see whether the money worked out. On a long-running one, it's much harder — hours need tracking, balances and cash flows need reconciling, and small expenses need logging constantly, or profit quietly disappears into revisions, delays, and unbilled "portfolio" work. Bogdanova had already left behind the earliest, chaotic stage of the business — the phase where every incoming payment gets treated as profit — but she still faced three concrete problems: she needed to know the true cost of each project, systematize her expenses to find what could be optimized, and move beyond simply logging cash movements to actual managerial accounting she could use to make decisions.
Solution
Bogdanova had already seen Finmap work at her previous company, where a dedicated accountant used it, so when she started her own studio the choice of tool was easy. She signed up for a trial, learned the workflows herself — uploading data, setting up integrations, exploring the analytics — and then went a step further by engaging a Finmap financial consultant, deciding that turning the numbers into a real strategic tool required outside expertise rather than self-service alone.
That partnership reshaped how the studio runs. Every project now gets priced with a structured cost breakdown, so when a client asks for extra revisions the team already knows the time and cost involved. Every client is set up as a separate project inside Finmap, with income and expenses tracked independently so Bogdanova can see real profitability and ROI project by project rather than one blended number. The studio also built a reserve-funds system, including a Contingency Fund that automatically sets aside 2% of every receipt for emergencies — plus additional funds for rent, training, and marketing, letting it plan ahead instead of reacting. Even small recurring costs get tracked — Bogdanova points out that $7 a month becomes $90 a year, and Finmap makes those leaks visible instead of invisible.
Results
Within a year of putting the full system in place — Finmap plus consistent financial oversight — Bogdanova Bureau grew revenue by 173% and increased net margin by 286%, after the team analyzed profitability by division, dropped low-margin projects, and doubled down on the ones that actually generated income.
The reserve funds also proved their worth when the full-scale war began and paused the economy. Rather than scrambling, the studio drew on its pre-built cushion while optimizing expenses, reshaping the team, and reallocating budgets — keeping projects moving through the hardest stretch. That stability became a launchpad: Bogdanova Bureau has since taken on successful projects outside Ukraine and built stable relationships with foreign clients in a competitive new market, with Bogdanova now aiming for fewer, bigger, more profitable engagements backed by the same financial discipline.
