How Virtuo reduced the time spent on budgeting preparation by 50%

At a glance

Through Pigment, Virtuo has been able to:

• Cut the time dedicated to data aggregation by running imports from Looker
• Shorten the update of budget files: one month with Google Sheets vs two weeks with Pigment 
• Reduce financial preparation to reforecasting time from three weeks with Google Sheets to two days with Pigment by reforecasting faster and more frequently with the scenarios feature
• Add more granularity in business analysis
• Enable stakeholders to make better decisions

Virtuo is the new generation of car rental companies. The company’s mission is to offer the best car rental experience that frees people and cities from the burden of car ownership. It operates in six countries: the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and new offices in Germany and Portugal.

Having multiplied its headcount by two and its turnover by four over the last two years, Virtuo was looking for an FP&A planning tool that could scale with changing models and support exponential database growth.

When Excel can’t scale, your FP&A process is broken!

By looking at Virtuo's path over the last two years, you can envision an incredibly fast-growing company:

And with that growth came the inherent challenges of an FP&A team working with Google Sheets, that couldn’t scale as fast as the business.

• Google Sheets frequently crashed trying to handle enormous data volumes
• Time to update budget files was growing increasingly
• The sheer volume of Google Sheets files quickly grew unreasonable

The time was ripe for a scaled FP&A process. Virtuo deployed Pigment to save more time for actionable analysis. As a result, the company was able to drive the business by providing fast, up-to-date insights to the leadership team.

Evolve your business planning to sustain your rate of growth

For fast-growing companies, agility is key. And the function of agile business planning is to:

• Evolve as fast as the business
• Give fast and accurate answers to stakeholders
• Help align the whole organization

By using Pigment, Virtuo has been able to:

• Cut the time dedicated to data aggregation by running imports from Looker
• Shorten the update of budget files: one month with Google Sheets vs two weeks with Pigment 
• Reduce financial preparation to reforecasting time from three weeks with Google Sheets to two days with Pigment by reforecasting faster and more frequently with the scenarios feature
• Add more granularity in business analysis
• Enable stakeholders to make better decisions

How to leverage Google API to win agility

Virtuo loves the stability and agility of the product. Presenting their numbers with Google Slides, they faced the limits of Google Suite.

Before using Pigment, creating new scenarios to analyze the sensitivity of one particular assumption was very time-consuming. It required them to create a new file and thus a new presentation if they wanted to keep track of both scenarios.

Now, with Pigment connected through an API to Google Sheets (itself connected to Google Slides), there is no longer a need for manual updates. They can create a new scenario on Pigment and reload it to Google Sheets in one click by running the script to update their Google slides presentation.
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Implement a business planning platform in four weeks

After just one month of implementation and training, Virtuo has been able to run its entire Budgeting process on Pigment at a granular level.

The FP&A team has enabled C-suite executives to identify the best growth opportunities for the business by deploying Pigment throughout the organization. This is achieved through a dedicated application with key drivers and scenario features that handle complex assumptions and data points.

The C-suite executives also use dedicated applications to evaluate multiple hiring hypotheses related to headcount and staff costs.

As a next step, the FP&A team is revamping their reporting processes. The team aims to empower stakeholders with access to aggregated inputs and dedicated dashboards to drive their decisions.

Virtuo’s top 3 favorite features

• "Transactions list" is super useful to manage massive historical data. By loading transactions items they're able to quickly map each item to specific properties (month, versions, country, etc.) which allow them to compare past hypotheses and versions of the database
• "Clone data to" and "What-if scenarios" allow the team to analyze assumptions and identify the best business opportunities
• "Show value as" percentage of another metric allows leadership to switch from consolidated views to the corresponding ratios in one click, in order to easily understand and monitor the KPIs