How LastMinute Cut Expense Categorization Time From Hours to Minutes With Puzzle

Resource-Intensive Accounting Workflows Created Operational Bottlenecks for LastMinute's Expansion

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As Founder and CEO of the lean but fast-growing healthcare startup LastMinute, Leo Dassa strives to spend his day-to-day engaging with prospects and closing deals. Of course, like many founders and executives at early-stage startups, he also has a million other things to do — including investor outreach, setting strategy, and managing the company’s finances.

Across these responsibilities, accounting required an outsized amount of Leo’s valuable time and energy. Because he was running the company's accounting function entirely in Excel, even standard workflows like expense categorization often consumed 3 to 4 hours of Leo’s time on a weekly basis – critical time that began to quickly add up on a monthly and quarterly timeframe.

As LastMinute continued to scale, Leo knew that his outdated, manual accounting system would cause more growth opportunities to slip through the cracks. To modernize his accounting function while reclaiming time for higher-value work, Leo sought a solution that would:
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• Automate expense categorization: Whenever Leo made a purchase, he had to log it in a bloated, multi-column spreadsheet manually. Doing this across a growing number of purchases not only took hours at a time but also introduced the risk of human error. His ideal accounting solution would automatically contextualize every transaction once it landed in the general ledger.
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• Unlock real-time financial visibility: Leo initially relied on bank statements to track major financial metrics like cash flow, burn rate, and runway. But by the time he had pulled the data, transferred it into Excel, and wrangled it into a report, the insights were already out of date. To make informed growth decisions, Leo required a real-time and holistic view of LastMinute’s financial position.
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• Facilitate fast, easy collaboration: To lift the accounting burden off his shoulders, Leo outsourced his Excel-based workflows to accounting firm Robert Volk & Co, in particular highlighting Li Zhang’s outstanding support as his accountant. However, even though Li is a world-class accountant, her support towards Excel and the spreadsheet-based workflow made it harder for Leo to follow along with her records in a scalable manner. For the best collaboration, both parties needed shared access to modern accounting software.

During his search for a solution that could fulfill these needs, Leo met a member of the Puzzle team during a company offsite. Once he began to learn more about the platform’s modern, automated accounting workflows, he couldn’t wait to get in on the action.

"Accounting can make or break an early-stage business. We knew we needed to get our reports out of Excel and into Puzzle if we wanted to grow without facing finance-related roadblocks."

Automated Bookkeeping and Real-Time Financial Insights in a Unified, Founder-Friendly Platform

Thanks to Puzzle's extensive native integrations (with tools like Stripe, Rippling, Mercury, Ramp, Brex, and more), Leo was able to hit the ground running with his new accounting function.

With Puzzle, he was no longer forced to scour Excel sheets to track LastMinute’s expenses. The platform's AI-powered expense categorization automatically records and labels every transaction without requiring manual input. As a result, Leo’s accountant can surface detailed expense breakdowns in mere minutes, not hours. Meanwhile, Leo can use Puzzle’s high-level expense overviews — which show spend patterns across categories — to optimize his budgets. 

But the visibility doesn't end there. The comprehensive Puzzle Dashboard also gives both Leo and his accountant on-demand access to LastMinute’s cash flow, burn rate, runway, and other key metrics. With easy-to-understand charts only a few clicks away, Leo can easily keep up with his accountant’s work and make informed financial decisions that fast-track growth. Even better, both he and his accountant can rest assured that they’re looking at the most accurate numbers because Puzzle’s AI automatically analyzes each report to ensure it’s audit-ready. 

As a busy founder with a company to grow, Leo sees Puzzle’s accounting software as the ultimate efficiency unlock. Manual accounting workflows used to consume hours of his time, but thanks to Puzzle’s automation, he can prioritize sales outreach and scaling his business with guaranteed peace of mind.

"The difference between Puzzle's accounting system and our old system was night and day. Reports that used to take hours now take a matter of minutes."

An Agile Accounting Function That Improves Financial Visibility, Saves Time, and Accelerates Month-End Close

Using Puzzle, Leo automated manual accounting tasks, gained 360-degree visibility into LastMinute’s financial health, and reclaimed bandwidth for other value-creating initiatives.
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And the results speak for themselves:
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• 3-4 hour reduction in expense categorization time
• 5 reliable, streaming integrations connection
• 75% faster closed books

Looking ahead, Leo can’t wait to deepen his partnership and collaboration with Puzzle’s attentive customer support team. Whether he needs help managing an integration or building a time-sensitive report, the Puzzle team is always ready to hop on and troubleshoot. He has no doubt they’ll be there through every step of LastMinute’s growth journey in the coming years.

"The Puzzle team goes above and beyond the call of duty. They always treat us like we're their only customer even though I know that couldn't be further from the truth."