How CompanyCam uses Pigment as the definitive, unified view of revenue and its drivers

At a glance

• Excel wasn’t collaborative or scalable enough for this growing software company
• Team of “data nerds” picked up Pigment near-instantly, rapidly achieving autonomy
• Completed implementation and rollout during budgeting season
• Execs have their own application for running scenarios, planning revenue, and allocating expenses
• Department leaders input requests and get insights directly in Pigment
• The vision is to use Pigment as the unified view for everything in the business

A team passionate about data but limited by spreadsheets

The finance team at CompanyCam are passionate about data. In fact, they’re self-described “data nerds” who love to analyze and optimize not just the data models but the underlying reality reflected by them. This means the team was hungry to provide a data solution that would add strategic value to the business, but spreadsheets just weren’t cutting it.

The team was building out somewhat effective data models in Excel, but this created a lot of issues with collaboration and with establishing a single source of truth. It was taking a lot of the team’s time to make sure department leaders understood the part of the models they were impacting, as well as to consolidate the data needed to achieve those models to begin with.

The team’s goal was to find a tool that they could better customize to the business, and which they could adapt and evolve easily as the business changes. They were especially focused on scalability, looking for both power and flexibility to enable scaling across the business.

Pigment: easy to love, easy to implement

The CompanyCam team cast the net fairly wide when evaluating tools, but once they had demoed Pigment, it was clear that it was the tool for them. The flexibility tipped it over the edge as they began to understand what was possible. They saw how the very foundations of implementing Pigment were aimed at scalability, which perfectly aligned with their mission as a team and a business.

Since the team had data experience, they found the Jumpstart trainings very intuitive and were working autonomously within the platform in a remarkable time. They implemented Pigment in the throes of budgeting season and yet were able to build their entire annual operating plan in Pigment. 

The impact was instant, with clear improvements in granularity and visibility on expense management, vendor-level management, and understanding variances.

By the time implementation was finished, they were moving onto new use cases without any reliance on the Pigment team.

Empowering execs and department leaders while also saving time

One of the biggest accomplishments of implementation were the applications and boards that made it possible for key business partners to use Pigment themselves.

For department leads, this meant creating boards for OPEX, Workforce and GTM requests, which then roll up into a single, unified view and strategy, enabled by the ability to share data blocks across the workspace. They’re inputting into, collaborating within and getting insights from a single platform with minimal back-and-forth to achieve those results.

The department leads have been thrilled with this process:

For the executives, collaboration came in the form of their own application, which allows them to plan out revenue and allocate expenses across the business. They can even run scenarios and conduct what-if analysis without any additional work from the finance team. This gives them far more control over the planning process than they’ve ever had before.

Not only are these business partners happier, but it takes significantly less effort for the finance team to achieve this. Before, data consolidation would take ages, with even just the assembly and commentary taking one person up to 4 days. Now that time is cut in half, and that’s on a slow day. The actual consolidation work is practically gone, with the data ready at their fingertips as soon as actuals are ready.

The pursuit of a single, unified view of the business

The promise of Pigment for CompanyCam is the ability to create a unified view to understand in real-time how every function and every decision is contributing to the bottom line, and to make strategic moves to optimize efficiency across all those functions.

There’s a clear vision for how this can happen, even down to how the product engineering function operates within and contributes to the business. Pigment is the guidepost to help them all run in the same direction, with everyone working from the same data and assumptions.

CompanyCam is currently live with their P&L, GTM Planning, Workforce Planning and OPEX Planning models in Pigment. Up next in their vision is their Sales Headcount, as well as an automated, real-time Cash Flow Statement and Balance Sheet setup. They’re also working on integrating even more data sources to progress towards making Pigment the source of truth for accessing business-wide data.