How American Power & Gas Transformed Financial Planning from Excel Chaos to Real-Time Intelligence with Pigment
Company Overview
Industry: Retail energy
Customer Base: 150,000+ accounts
Team Size: Small finance team (2-person FP&A)
Business Model: Multi-product energy retail with usage-based billing
Key Outcomes
A single dimensional model
Hundreds of rows per product replaced with one metric that calculates instantly
Real-time data feeds
Monthly manual processes now update automatically with live data feeds
Unified scenario planning and forecasting
Eliminated forecast misalignment that triggered executive debates
Challenge: Excel Waterfalls and Forecast Misalignment Threatening Growth
Every growing company eventually hits the wall where spreadsheet-based processes can no longer support the business. For Christopher Jack, Director of FP&A at American Power & Gas, that moment came during a particularly frustrating executive meeting.
"We had a meeting with our CFO, our controller, and head of operations," Jack recalled. "At the beginning of last year we still had two forecasts — one that was operationally driven, and then the FP&A forecast. They weren't exactly the same, and we're going back and forth about how much margin we're going to make for the year."
The meeting devolved into a painful exercise of sharing screens and comparing numbers that simply didn't align. "Nothing matched. Nothing was lined up," Jack explained. "All those salaries on the call, debating back and forth about things that should be fairly straightforward and shouldn't really be up for debate. The light bulb went off — this is the time. We have to do this."
The underlying problem was that AP&G's 150,000 customer accounts were billed monthly using different rate structures, creating massive data complexity that Excel simply couldn't handle efficiently. The company's revenue forecasting relied on enormous waterfall calculations that consumed hundreds of rows per product, with separate waterfalls needed for each offering.
With the company's workbook already too large to email and requiring manual updates that took days to complete, Jack knew the existing approach wouldn't scale. The small FP&A team of just two people needed tools that could handle the volume and complexity of their energy industry data while freeing them to focus on strategic analysis rather than manual maintenance.
Solution: Pigment Platform with Collaborative Implementation
The make-or-break criteria for AP&G’s FP&A vendor evaluation was data handling and dimensionality.
"We have so many dimensions, so much data that if the software couldn't handle a lot of dimensions and a lot of data, it just wasn't going to work for us," he explained. "Some software is great, but some are slimmed down for particular uses - maybe scenario forecasting or consolidation, or more enterprise focused."
Pigment emerged as the clear frontrunner that could handle AP&G’s data complexity. "It really blew me away - the ability to handle data,” Jack recalled.
As Jack evaluated Pigment against another finalist vendor, implementation became a crucial factor. While competitors were hesitant to demonstrate live capabilities, Bright Point and Pigment took a more collaborative approach. "This is the only product that people were bold enough to actually build live in front of us," Jack noted. "We gave you all a data set with a lot of data and dimensions, and on the fly you built out a revenue forecast."
That collaborative approach extended to the actual implementation process as well. Traditionally, FP&A platform implementations focused on “building everything for you,” according to Jack. But “what was different with the Pigment implementation is it was more co-builds.”
“The last time I implemented an FP&A tool, they built it for us and gave it to us. We went live, but it took a long time to really understand what we were doing in it. With Pigment, I understand the flow of data because we were learning as we went.”
Results: From Maintenance Mode to Strategic Expansion
The impact hit immediately during AP&G's first month live. What once required days of manual Excel updates now happens in real-time, and the massive revenue waterfalls that consumed hundreds of rows per product have been replaced by a single dimensional model that calculates instantly.
"In Excel, we were waterfalling the accounts and the rates for what we were going to charge customers," Jack explained. "Now this shows us every single one of those rates on the line. We can go in and look at any one of our utilities, any one of our products, and walk ourselves through the life cycle."
Jack now carries a tablet to executive meetings, accessing current rates and forecasts instantly. "If the President wants to know what that rate was, I can pull it up in a matter of seconds. If it was Excel, I'd have to wait for that gigantic file to open up and hopefully my computer could handle it."
The success has expanded AP&G's vision far beyond the original implementation scope. The company is now in Phase 2, adding additional entities, European operations, and comprehensive pricing calculations. "We're taking any report that sources its data from the SQL database or our accounting software and really trying to put it in Pigment and centralize all of our forecasting into one source," Jack said.
The team has also gained the confidence to build independently. Their executive dashboard, featuring real-time graphics and drill-down capabilities, was built entirely by the AP&G team after implementation. "We're already getting buy-in from executives, and we're a month out from go-live," Jack noted. "With the other software, it took us much longer to get comfortable and get executive buy-in."
"If you need to crunch data and handle large sets with multiple dimensions, don't even look at anything else. This is the right one. To me, Pigment's biggest strength is its ability to consolidate that data and then crunch that data."