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CUSTOMER STORIES > SNAP FINANCE
Planning Smarter, Faster: How Snap Finance Transformed Capacity Planning
​With Cinareo, Snap moved beyond Excel to streamline planning, improve cross-team alignment, and support strategic decisions with greater accuracy.
A conversation with:
Capacity planner, Snap Finance
ABOUT
Snap Finance harnesses the power of data to empower consumers of all credit types to get what they need.
HQ
Salt Lake City, UT
INDUSTRY
Fintech
COMPANY SIZE
1000 - 2000
Background
Snap Finance is a leading U.S. consumer fintech company offering lease-to-own payment solutions to credit-challenged customers. With a large and fast-moving customer care operation of roughly 750 agents, balancing staffing with service goals and budget demands is critical to success.
Wesley (Wes) Curtis, Capacity Planner at Snap Finance, plays a central role in keeping the care organization on budget and properly staffed. He forecasts long-term headcount needs, supports staffing decisions across multiple departments, and delivers insights to leaders in customer service, collections, HR, and more.
The Challenge
Manual processes slowed everything down
Snap Finance’s planning process relied entirely on Excel – a tool that quickly became a bottleneck as the team scaled.
“The hardest part was just getting everything into the format everyone wanted to see,” Wes said. He found himself rebuilding the same dataset into multiple views for different teams. The collections team needed one version, the training team another, and the executive team yet another.
Each update involved repetitive formatting, graphing, and explaining how numbers were derived. Even small differences in presentation would derail conversations, turning what should be strategic planning into clarification sessions. Wes pointed out that “there was always confusion… what does this number mean, how is this headcount calculated? It slowed down meetings and made it harder to align.”
In fast-moving strategy discussions, these discrepancies created unnecessary friction. “I had to rework reports for every audience. That takes time, and it’s easy to make a mistake.”
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Planning further ahead increased the burden
Snap Finance’s workforce plans extend well into the future, sometimes up to 36 months out. Managing multi-year plans in Excel wasn’t just tedious, it introduced risk.
As Wes explained, “just trying to calculate how much labor money we were going to spend across all the plans I manage could take hours.” With multiple business lines and shifting volumes, one missed formula could throw off the entire projection.
The Solution
Wes was introduced to Cinareo through an industry event. He wasn’t actively shopping for a dedicated capacity planning solution, as they had originally been exploring new scheduling tools. But after a conversation with the Cinareo team, it became clear that a purpose-built platform for multi-channel, multi-skill planning could dramatically improve how Snap planned and communicated staffing needs.
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“What excited me most,” he said, “was having a platform where I could just provide the data, and it would generate everything I needed. It automated the hard stuff – the calculations, formatting, and various versions of reporting.”
Long-range planning with confidence
Cinareo enabled Snap to streamline both short- and long-term planning. Wes explained that before Cinareo, “we had to rely on spreadsheets and workarounds. It was slow and prone to error. Now all I have to do is input the key metrics like volume and AHT, new-hire learning curve and shrinkage, and Cinareo did the rest. It’s a huge help when you’re planning years out.”
To validate the platform internally, Wes ran Cinareo in parallel with his Excel models for the first year. The results were reassuring. “We never noticed any issues. In fact, Cinareo’s forecasts ran closer to actuals than our original models.”
“I can also pull the same report and show it to five different teams. Everyone understands it. I don’t have to explain what numbers mean anymore,” he praised.
This standardization changed the tone of cross-functional planning meetings. Instead of debating report formats or clarifying metrics, conversations could stay focused on strategy.
The Results
Cinareo didn’t just change how Snap Finance planned. It changed what they could accomplish.
Faster forecasts, reduced errors
One of the most immediate benefits was time savings. “That saved me many hours each week just on calculating how much labor money we were going to spend,” Wes said. Supporting seven different business lines, those hours add up quickly across a year.
More importantly, Cinareo helped reduce the risk of manual errors that previously crept into spreadsheet-driven processes. Being just 0.5% wrong could have cost us millions of dollars each year. Automating calculations and enforcing consistency meant staffing and budget decisions were finally grounded in reliable, trusted data.
From reactive planning to strategic alignment
Cross-functional communication also improved. With a single, standardized reporting format, departments stopped debating how numbers were calculated and started focusing on what the numbers meant. “It used to be a lot of explaining,” Wes said. “Now the data speaks for itself.”
That clarity extended to leadership. Executives and VPs could review reports without needing walkthroughs. Even frontline supervisors found value in the clean, consistent format, using the data to inform daily decisions and staffing conversations.
Beyond time savings: balancing cost, customer, and employee outcomes
Time savings are often the first benefit teams notice, but it’s only a small part of the total ROI. While Wes primarily focused on planning efficiency and accuracy, Cinareo’s strategic value extends further. By improving planning precision and enabling faster decision-making, organizations like Snap Finance are better positioned to:
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Optimize staffing levels to avoid both over- and under-resourcing
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Anticipate and proactively manage attrition
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Consistently meet service level objectives by aligning staffing with demand
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Support agent experience by reducing overwork and improving schedule stability
This shift helps workforce teams better balance cost, customer experience, and employee satisfaction – three areas that often compete for attention but are deeply interdependent.
Looking ahead
While Wes hadn’t set out to overhaul Snap Finance’s capacity planning tools, Cinareo quickly became a core part of his team’s process. “It was kind of a happy accident that we found Cinareo,” he said, “but it’s made planning so much easier and more intuitive across the board.”
Cinareo simplifies reporting, improves planning accuracy, and supports long-term decision-making. With it, Snap Finance has turned capacity planning from a tactical burden into a strategic lever. The result: better staff planning and budgeting, stronger cross-team alignment, and more sustainable business outcomes.