G2

Verified User in Computer Games

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/23/2026

"Great Project Expense Tracking For Our Small Game Studio"

4/5

What do you like best about finally?

To be totally upfront, what I like best about Finally is how it keeps our freelance contractor bills, artist invoices and studio operating expenses all tied directly to individual game projects, without burying us under heavy accounting complexity. I’m Paul Edub, Digital Operations Coordinator at Nexus Play Studio, a small game studio with 11–50 people. We work with tons of contract 3D modelers, concept artists, sound designers and external publishing partners, and before moving to Finally, we were managing all our finance stuff with Xero. We ran into a really stressful issue on our puzzle prototype project last quarter that made me rethink our finance stack entirely.

We brought on a freelance character artist to create a cast of NPCs for that prototype. The artist sent over two separate invoices: one for base concept sketches and a second pass for rigged model files. Our finance admin logged both bills inside Xero, but Xero’s project tagging wasn’t intuitive for splitting these staged vendor payments. They accidentally assigned the rigging invoice to our older retro arcade game project instead of the puzzle prototype. A few weeks later, our lead producer pulled up the puzzle game’s budget burn report and thought we still had plenty of budget left for more art. He approved another large contract, only to realize later we’d already eaten up far more of the prototype budget than the report showed. That forced us to pause a planned animation milestone and negotiate a delayed delivery timeline with our artist, which pushed our playtest schedule back by nearly two weeks. It was a messy bottleneck all because the expense wasn’t tagged to the right project.

Finally’s project-first expense workflow is the main draw for me. Every game, prototype and marketing campaign gets its own project bucket from the start. When a freelancer submits an invoice or we pay for third-party asset packs, I tag that line straight to the correct project. I can instantly see total committed spend, pending bills and how much budget remains for each title. Last month we had three active prototypes running at once, and I pulled each project’s spend snapshot right before our weekly production sync. I spotted that one sound design invoice had sat unapproved for over a week, and we got it processed quickly so the artist could keep delivering audio assets on schedule. That kind of at-a-glance visibility was so much harder to get reliably inside Xero.

I also really appreciate how straightforward the approval routing is. A lot of our vendor bills need sign-off from the lead producer before finance can cut payment. Inside Finally, I set up custom approval rules: any bill over $1,500 automatically routes to the producer first. Before, we just forwarded PDF invoices over Slack and email, and approvals would slip through when producers were deep in crunch time debugging builds. The system sends clear reminders, and it keeps a full audit log of who approved what and when. That’s huge for us when our publishing partners ask for spend breakdowns during milestone reviews.

The receipt capture via mobile upload is another handy feature. Our team goes to industry conferences and pays for quick asset store purchases on company cards. Staff snap a photo of the receipt, attach it to the expense line, and tag the relevant game project. No more digging through old Slack threads looking for a jpeg receipt weeks later. The permission controls are well thought out too: producers can review spend for only their assigned projects, but they can’t touch our tax settings or bank connections.

Finally isn’t a full ERP and it doesn’t handle our payroll, so we keep that tracked separately. But for tracking contractor invoices, monitoring project burn and keeping our studio budgets transparent for dev and marketing teams, it fits our game studio rhythm really well. It prevents that silent budget misallocation that messed up our puzzle prototype timeline, and that’s the biggest win for our team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about finally?

The most persistent issue is how clunky its partial bill adjustment and credit handling works once a vendor invoice is tied to a live project. A couple months ago, our external animation studio hit scope delays on our adventure game cutscene work. We agreed to reduce their final bill and apply a partial credit against the amount already logged in Finally. When I tried to apply that credit directly to the existing project expense entry, the system didn’t recalculate the project burn automatically. The dashboard kept showing the original higher spend number for that animation task. Our producer used that misleading burn value to sign off on a new VFX contractor, not realizing we already had that credit pending. By the time I reconciled bank transactions a week later, we were at risk of overextending that prototype budget. Fixing it meant creating manual journal adjustments and leaving detailed notes for our publishing partner’s audit trail. There isn’t an intuitive native flow for these scope-change credits, which pop up constantly when we iterate on game art and animation.

I also dislike that Finally’s webhook alerts are extremely limited and inconsistent. I set up webhooks to notify me whenever a vendor bill is marked approved, so I can follow up on milestone spend updates with our publishing contact. Last sprint, three separate sound design invoices got approved, but none of the webhook triggers fired. There was no failure alert sent to our Slack, no visible log entry to flag the missed trigger. We didn’t notice until our partner reached out asking why we hadn’t shared the latest spend breakdown. I dug through the event history and found the system only records successful triggers; silent failures disappear without warning. Debugging these sync gaps is slow because I don’t get clear context about what broke.

Another letdown is the absence of custom expense fields that attach to line items. We track things like asset deliverable type, milestone ID, and build version for every contractor invoice line. Finally only lets me add custom fields on the header of the bill, not per individual expense row. We had a situation where a single invoice from our texture vendor covered assets for two separate levels in our game. I could only attach one milestone reference to the whole bill, so I couldn’t separate the level-one spend from level-two spend inside the system. When our director asked to pull costs broken down by milestone, I had to manually split the line items into a separate spreadsheet, creating another disconnected source of financial data we have to maintain. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is finally solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Finally, tracking contractor costs and project burn across our game prototypes was messy and easy to mismanage, and we learned the hard way that poor budget visibility can derail our milestone timelines and hurt trust with publishing partners. I’m Paul Edub, Digital Operations Coordinator at Nexus Play Studio. Back then we relied entirely on Xero, and we ran into a serious issue on our adventure game vertical slice. Our animation vendor sent an invoice for cutscene work, and our finance lead assigned it to the wrong project in Xero. Our producer reviewed the budget report, thought we still had room to bring on an extra effects artist, and locked in that contract. It wasn’t until two weeks later that we spotted the tagging error; we were already over budget on that vertical slice and had to cut a secondary animation shot to stay within our agreed milestone budget with the publisher. That stressful event pushed me to search for a tool built around project-level expense tracking for creative teams like ours.

What Finally fixes for us is that it gives every game, prototype and marketing initiative its own dedicated budget bucket. Every freelance bill, asset store purchase, contractor invoice and approved expense attaches directly to the matching project. No more floating expenses that exist outside a clear project context. Once our dev or marketing team approves a vendor bill, it feeds straight into that project’s running burn total. Our producers can open the project dashboard anytime and instantly see what’s been spent, what bills are pending, and how much budget remains. Last month we juggled three active prototypes at the same time, and ahead of our publisher sync, I pulled burn totals in minutes. We quickly caught a pending invoice for environmental art that had sat untouched, and we got it approved so the artist could keep delivering assets on schedule. This eliminates the blind spots that caused that overspend incident on our adventure slice.

It also fixes our broken approval workflow we had in Xero. Back then, we passed invoices around over Slack and email PDFs for sign-off. When producers were deep in crunch fixing bugs or preparing playtest builds, approval requests would fall through the cracks. Finally lets me set tiered approval rules. Any bill above $1,500 automatically routes to the lead producer for sign-off, with automated reminders if they haven’t responded. The system keeps a clear audit trail showing who signed off and when. This is really valuable when our publishing partner asks for proof of spend approvals during milestone reviews. We don’t have to dig through old chat logs to prove we followed our budget governance rules.

Mobile receipt capture is another big upgrade from our old workflow. Our team buys asset packs, attends game dev conferences, and racks up small ad-hoc expenses. Team members snap a photo of the receipt right away inside Finally, tag the correct project, and submit it. No more chasing people down weeks later asking for receipt files buried in Slack threads. I can also configure tailored user roles: producers can view spend and pending bills only for their assigned titles, without getting access to sensitive studio-wide financial data or tax settings. That balances visibility with data security.

I won’t pretend Finally is perfect. It struggles with scope credits on active projects, its webhook notifications aren’t reliable, and we can’t add custom fields to individual expense lines. I still keep a separate spreadsheet to track milestone-specific breakdowns that Finally can’t generate natively. Even so, the main benefit for our studio is consistent, traceable budget oversight. It cuts down human error from mis-tagged vendor invoices, speeds up our approval cycle for freelance collaborators, and keeps our producers and publisher aligned on project spend so we don’t hit surprise budget overruns mid-production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.