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

At a glance

• Replaced complex, siloed Excel models with a collaborative, real-time planning platform, establishing a single source of truth across Finance and the broader organization
• Enabled cross-functional collaboration and dynamic modeling tailored to evolving business needs
• Automated processes like headcount reconciliation to improve efficiency and productivity
• Used the Modeler Agent to reduce model build times from weeks to hours and enable faster, more regular iteration

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.

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.

What’s next: Designing faster with the Modeler Agent

Figma is now leveraging the Modeler Agent to accelerate how ideas move from concept to execution, dramatically reducing the time it takes to design, build, and validate new models.

What once required hours of framework design and modeling can now be completed in minutes. Instead of starting from a blank canvas, the team can describe what they want in plain English and receive Pigment-ready outputs grounded in their business context, enabling them to refine rather than rebuild.

“The Modeler Agent has exceeded expectations. What used to take hours of designing, modeling and framework building can now be done in minutes. We can spin up ideas quickly, share them with stakeholders earlier, and iterate faster. It’s like having a sparring partner in your back pocket.”

Jack Silvert, Strategic Finance, Business Systems and Operations, Figma

The impact is both practical and cultural. Models that previously took weeks to build and validate can now be spun up in hours and shared earlier with stakeholders, accelerating feedback cycles dramatically.

By removing the friction of initial setup, the Modeler Agent gives the team greater confidence to experiment. 

It fills in more than 80% of the foundation, asks the right follow-up questions, and provides clear paths forward, allowing Figma’s team to focus on improving the “what” rather than figuring out the “how.”

Looking ahead, Figma sees an opportunity to apply the Modeler Agent to streamline financial statement reporting, enabling broader self-service, simplifying evolving reporting requirements, and maintaining consistency as the business scales.

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