How Loggi simplified their budgeting, financial planning and reporting processes

At a glance

Through Pigment, Loggi has been able to:

• Cut the time dedicated to data aggregation by running imports from SAP
• Implement a smoother budgeting process involving cost center managers
• Add more granularity in business analysis and easily manage a large amount of variables and dimensions
• Improve access rights control
• Allow stakeholders to make better decisions 
• Align the organization
• Provide faster answers to stakeholders

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Loggi is a Brazilian logistics unicorn founded in 2013, with over 3,200 employees and counting. The company offers food delivery and courier services, delivering approximately 350,000 packages daily across Brazil.

Loggi has offices in Brazil and Portugal, with all its operations in Brazil. 

Following a Series F funding round of $212 million in March of 2021, the company had further expansion plans to open dozens of branches across the country as well as new distribution centers.

In Spring of 2021, Loggi started looking for an FP&A software that could support their exponential growth and simplify their budgeting, financial planning, and reporting processes.

Moving budgeting away from Google Sheets

Loggi’s budgeting process was decentralized and siloed. The revenue management team was working on Revenue while the Operations team worked on COGS, all in different Google Sheets. They were using a top down approach, splitting the allocated budget  into different cost centers. Additionally, they were also looking at actuals vs. forecasts in separate Google Sheets. As a result of this decentralized process, the following issues started to arise:

• Maintenance and scalability issues: A growing number of cost center managers and teams were using individual spreadsheets to input their plans, which became difficult to maintain and scale with a high risk of breaking formulas and models
  
  
• Data integrity and auditability: cost center managers could update information often impacting the entirety of the model, that was difficult to track and audit
  
  
• Little visibility on P&L data for Business contributors and C-level executives

They needed to move away from Google Sheets to have a smoother process and went for Pigment as their go-to FP&A platform.

Standardizing the budgeting process and getting input from cost center managers

Loggi’s first Pigment use case was to improve and standardize the budgeting process as they were constantly adding new cost centers. They started by building a common budget input template for cost center managers to easily input their expenses for the month. This allowed them to have a more bottom-up approach.

It’s now also much simpler to automatically add new cost centers. These are then reflected and updated in all reports in just a couple of clicks, significantly easing common challenges faced by modelers.

This new seamless budgeting process helps the finance team drive consistency across business units. Pigment’s easy-to-use interface also simplifies the process of aggregating cost center managers’ input. Information and processes flow better without needing several comments in Google Sheets and with no fear of breaking models.

Loggi’s FP&A team also wanted to have everything connected and in one place. Not only did they use Pigment for budgeting, but also for cash flow management and reporting on KPIs.

Reporting on KPIs

Each month, Loggi’s FP&A team upload their actuals from SAP using the Pigment Google Sheets connector to compare budget vs. actuals. They can report on expenses and headcounts on a weekly and monthly basis.

They can run variance analyses and understand where KPIs deviate at a very granular level for each of their 85 cost centers.

The FP&A team used to have unending meetings with C-level executives in order to update them on their progress. Everyone can now collaborate in Pigment and see updates in real-time.

By using Pigment, Loggi has been able to:

• Cut the time dedicated to data aggregation by running imports from SAP
• Implement a smoother budgeting process involving cost center managers
• Add more granularity in business analysis and easily manage a large amount of variables and dimensions
• Improve access rights control
• Allow stakeholders to make better decisions 
• Align the organization
• Provide faster answers to stakeholders

Loggi took about three months to implement Pigment to make sure it was truly tailored to their business. They were able to train modelers easily and they were very happy with the adoption from cost center managers, all navigating smoothly in Pigment.

What’s next?

Loggi is now expanding to using Pigment for headcount planning. The company has started looking at actuals vs. budget in terms of seniority or per cost center. Organizing all data in one place and analyzing it is the first step for determining a strong plan and managing the workforce effectively.

Loggi’s top 3 favorite features

• “Scenarios” to easily create several versions of the budget, make different assumptions on business opportunities, and improve forecast accuracy.
• “Dimensions management” in Pigment is a huge time saver when adding a lot of cost centers, new accounts or regions.‍
• “Snapshots” are great to use as a back up when they need to retrieve a formula or look at historical data.