Figma's Finance team became a strategic partner by saving time on manual reconciliations

At a glance

• As a digital product design company, they faced obstacles and limitations using Excel as their primary financial planning tool.
• As they scaled their operations, Excel continued to cause further process issues. 
• Excel’s lack of collaboration tools impeded its ability to promote department teamwork and hindered data and insights sharing with stakeholders. 
• Maintaining a single source of truth became more challenging, leading to difficulties with data reporting and accurate decision-making processes. 

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Limited collaboration with consolidated Excel models

Figma, founded in 2016, is a collaborative, web-based digital product design company with over 600 employees. 

Initially, they primarily relied on a consolidated Excel model that provided a broad overview of their financial data. However, as they continued to scale their operations, they faced significant limitations while using Excel as their financial planning tool. As they continued to grow, they began to face issues with collaboration.

Excel lacked the real-time collaboration tools to facilitate efficient teamwork and seamless data sharing between employees and teams. This led to inefficiencies, delays in their decision-making processes, and difficulties maintaining a single source of truth. 

Manual data-sharing methods, such as sending financial data to individual stakeholders outside the finance team, proved highly time-consuming and impractical.

Figma sought a solution that could address the limitations of their initial models by establishing a holistic financial planning framework. This led Figma to choose Pigment, a dynamic financial planning platform with powerful and robust tools such as real-time updates, collaboration tools, and simultaneous analysis. 

They also faced specific challenges related to the time-consuming nature of their manual headcount reconciliation processes. This utilized a substantial amount of valuable organizational resources and time and impacted the team’s ability to focus on in-depth, value-added financial analysis and extract critical insights. 

By integrating Pigment’s automation capabilities, Figma was able to empower substantial improvements in its headcount reconciliation processes. This enabled them to reduce the need for manual data collection and cross-referencing, automate complex workflows and derive more actionable insights.

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How Figma leveraged dynamic flexibility to facilitate headcount automation and obtain better insights

Figma quickly recognized the need for an all-inclusive, highly effective tool that could address their growing need for improved collaboration and more automated headcount reconciliation workflows. After careful evaluation, they chose Pigment. Their decision was primarily driven by Pigment’s dynamic flexibility and real-time updates that could be leveraged to transform cross-departmental collaboration.

By automating their headcount reconciliation processes, the finance team could redirect their efforts into higher-level business processes and uplevel their contributions. This helped shift their responsibilities from manually sharing insights with other teams to accelerating their role as strategic drivers of key business objectives. 

Furthermore, Figma greatly appreciated the support and guidance they received from Pigment throughout the process. One of their essential requirements from a financial planning tool was a partner that demonstrated a genuine interest and investment in their success through shared goals. 

Overall, the implementation of Pigment helped to empower Figma to optimize and strategize its business processes to accelerate long-term organizational success. 

How Figma would describe Pigment’s platform

• Dynamic
• Powerful
• Fun

Conclusion 

By using Pigment, Figma has been able to:

• Enable real-time collaboration across various organizational departments.
• Overcome the limitations of consolidated Excel models to improve collaboration and teamwork.
• Leverage dynamic flexibility to tailor the tool to their unique preferences and requirements.
• Receive continuous support from Pigment’s team to maximize success throughout the implementation process.
• Uplevel, the contributions of employees.
• Automate headcount reconciliation processes to improve efficiency and productivity.