How Ethic's head of finance replaced hours of report-building with a single prompt

The challenge

Diogo Rodrigues, the Head of Finance at Ethic, keeps a principle from his CEO close at hand when thinking about his work: cash isn't the purpose of the business, but it is the lifeblood, the oxygen. For a growing company, knowing exactly where that money is going and how it's trending isn't optional. It's the foundation of every forecast, headcount plan, and back-of-the-envelope projection that gets made in a leadership meeting.

At Ethic, the majority of that spend lives in payroll. And all of it lives in Rippling. But getting from the raw data to something usable — a clean view of monthly burn rate broken down by category, by team, by country, trended over six or twelve months — required building it by hand every time.

„Cash is obviously not the purpose of your company, but it is the lifeblood, the oxygen of your business. I'm always trying to understand how we're spending that large chunk of money and where it's going.

Diogo Rodrigues

Head of Finance bei Ethic

The process was multi-step and fragile. First, build a custom payroll journal report inside Rippling, iterating through several versions to get the right fields and format — a process that alone took a few hours the first time. Then extract it to Excel. Then build the outputs: burn rate by period, cost per headcount, department-level breakdowns, trend lines across the six-to-twelve month window where compensation changes and hiring spikes become visible.

Even after all that setup, running the report again on a monthly or quarterly basis still took up to an hour. And every time the team structure changed — a new hire in a different country, a shift in how departments were organized — the report needed tweaking before it could be trusted again.

The data existed. The problem was the hours it took to turn it into something the executive team could act on.

The solution

Diogo replaced the entire manual workflow with a single prompt: "What is our current monthly payroll burn rate and how has it trended over the past six and twelve months?"

What came back covered everything the manual process had been built to produce — and more. Rippling AI broke down the most recent payroll run into its component buckets: gross pay, employer taxes, and all employer benefits, giving a fully-loaded cost per employee. It included full headcount for the period, enabling an immediate cost-per-FTE calculation. It surfaced the six and twelve month trend, capturing hiring spikes, compensation review cycles, and any one-off payroll events like bonuses or severance. And because Ethic operates across the US, Japan, and Canada, it automatically broke the data out by country, displaying figures in local currency for each region.

„With Rippling AI, all it took was one prompt in plain English, and it gave me the information I needed. I wasn't expecting it to give me the exact answer I wanted so quickly.

Diogo Rodrigues

Head of Finance bei Ethic

That top-level view was just the starting point. From there, Diogo could drill down into any dimension without leaving the conversation — by department, team, or payroll category to separate wages from bonuses and severance. The same query that used to require a custom Excel build could now be broken into follow-up questions and refined in real time.

Rippling AI also surfaced something the spreadsheet never did: at the end of each response, it appended links to relevant help articles and documentation, flagging its own sources so the output could be verified. For a finance function dealing with sensitive compensation data, that transparency matters.

And for any analysis that needs to run on a recurring basis, Diogo trusts that Rippling AI can build the custom report itself. Instead of spending hours constructing and maintaining reports with the right fields, he can simply ask the system to create it.

The impact

Hours reduced to a single prompt. Building a custom payroll burn rate report from scratch took a few hours of setup and up to 60 minutes to refresh each cycle. One plain-English prompt now returns the same output instantly: fully loaded, trended, and broken down by country, team, and category.

A fuller picture than the spreadsheet. Accounting and ERP systems don't carry the same level of payroll granularity that Rippling does. The prompt output — gross pay, employer taxes, employer benefits, cost per FTE, multi-country breakdowns — captures details that the previous process had to approximate.

No more rebuilding when things change. Every team restructure, new country hire, or compensation cycle used to require tweaking the underlying report before it could be trusted. Because the analysis now runs on live Rippling data, the prompt stays accurate regardless of what changes underneath it.

A foundation for every headcount decision. Understanding payroll burn rate per headcount, and how it has evolved over time, is the starting point for every forward-looking plan: 6-month forecasts, 18-month headcount models, and the back-of-the-envelope calculations that inform every leadership conversation about where the business is going.

„The efficiency with Rippling AI through the roof. Understanding how much money we're spending per headcount and how that's changed over time — that's a very good starting point on planning for the future.

Diogo Rodrigues

Head of Finance bei Ethic

When the analysis takes hours, it happens less often, gets simplified, and arrives after the decisions it should inform. When it takes one sentence, it becomes routine — and the planning that depends on it gets sharper.