How Planity reduced monthly closing time by 80% with Pigment

At a glance

• French tech company with huge volumes of finance data
• Excel process was slow and manual, with little to no collaboration
• Shaved 80% off monthly closing time with added insights and analysis (from more than a week down to two working days)
• Executive stakeholders and sales team self-serve with dedicated Pigment dashboards
• Former auditor-turned-Finance Controller Elodie Tran loves the granularity and auditability
• “Honestly, it’s the best thing that we could have done. And it’s quite fun, actually, to put into place.”

Excel couldn’t facilitate the level of granularity, flexibility and collaboration Planity needed

In 2021, Planity was stuck using a clunky Excel model for all their financial reporting and analysis. As a tech provider for the beauty and wellness industries with more than 30,000 customers and a new appointment booked on the platform every second, they have a high volume of sales and finance data, and Excel just wasn’t up to the challenge of modeling that data in a meaningful way. Their spreadsheets were heavy, slow and unreliable, and though Finance Controller Elodie Tran worked diligently to reconcile the data and prepare reports, it was taking too much time and not delivering much value.

This was particularly true for their monthly closing process. Closing the month involved lots of copying and pasting, updating over 50,000 lines per month. It was a very manual process, creating too much opportunity for error. One deleted line or mistake could cause huge discrepancies in the results, eroding confidence in the data simply because the tool wasn’t capable of supporting the data volumes and modeling requirements. This process took nearly a week every month to complete.

Tran was also building reports for the sales team within Excel. And while they appreciated the insights she was providing, building and accessing them in Excel was clunky and slow, and it was difficult to ask questions and find answers. 

Pigment’s ease of use and co-build implementation created true autonomy

Planity’s VP Finance Thibault Chaufour first heard about Pigment from another customer, who were using the platform and loving it. As soon as he started to look into it for Planity, it became clear that Pigment offered exactly what they were looking for: a more powerful and flexible tool that would save time and add value without sacrificing granularity. 

During their initial explorations, Thibault and Elodie were thrilled with how easy Pigment was to update. For example, it was clear very early that adding a new country to the finance models would be as easy as adding it to the dimension list, rather than having to duplicate and check twenty different Excel sheets for each addition.

The ease of use was the real draw, however, which Elodie knew would make collaboration with other teams and surfacing insights much quicker and easier. The look and feel was an important part of this; Elodie knew that the user experience would be crucial for adoption of a new tool.

As the Pigment owner within Planity, Elodie began the co-building process, working with a Pigment Solution Architect to build out the core applications needed. This approach was key to creating autonomy for Planity so they can own and grow their models and environment confidently moving forward. Even after taking a break for parental leave, Tran was able to pick back up with the build and complete the core suite of finance applications for Planity.

80% reduction in monthly closing time, with added insights for sales and execs

Now, Elodie’s time is spent much less on manual data consolidation and validation and more on analysis and generating new insights. The monthly closing process that previously took over a week in Excel now takes only two working days, with all actuals and transactions input into Pigment. 

Another big win has been the sales reporting, which the team is now accessing directly within Pigment. Because of the easy to use, descriptive boards Elodie and her team have created, minimal onboarding was needed for them to self-serve and access important insights like AOV, new MRR, churn, leaderboards, and even trends and analytics by individual and team. 

Senior stakeholders at Planity are also benefiting from the time saved, with dashboards where they can access the insights most important to them and explore filters and edits to make decisions and strategize. Elodie and team have been able to add new KPIs to track thanks to the increased bandwidth, which adds new insight for all stakeholders.

VP Finance Thibault Chaufour in particular uses Pigment daily. He loves that there is a single source of truth for finance data rather than having to reconcile duplicate (and sometimes disparate) figures in Excel. Confidence in finance data is at an all-time high, and while finance has always been highly respected at Planity, they’re adding more value than ever with Pigment.

As a former auditor, Elodie is especially pleased with the level of granularity still available in the platform. The drill-down functionality, dependency diagrams and block sharing all create a much more streamlined, easy-to-analyze environment that increases confidence and saves time, even for detailed processes like auditing.

An ever-evolving environment for an ever-evolving business, without sacrificing reliability

The time savings are allowing Elodie and her growing team to turn their attention to new applications and functionality, like facilitating the annual budget within Pigment and building connectors to their key data sources, like Stripe, which holds their payment data.

When asked what her advice would be for other businesses considering Pigment, Elodie was enthusiastic in her reply: