From 10 People to 3: How A1 Ran a 1,500-Attendee Event Without Spreadsheets

Most software case studies compare a customer against an idealized "before." This one compares the same event against itself. In 2024, the travel management company A1 handled the logistics for roughly 1,500 attendees at one of the largest marketing events in Brazil, running the whole operation on spreadsheets. In 2025 the event came back, at the same scale, and A1 ran it on Pypo. Same client, same months of work, a very different week before doors opened.

Nine Months, Four Parallel Spreadsheets

The 2024 project did not start in November. It started in February, when the budget opened. Room blocks across three hotels were held in March. Air ticket issuance began in August. The event itself ran in November.

That is nine months of a live budget: quotes arriving, services approved, numbers moving, and a spreadsheet somewhere that had to be told about every one of them. Alongside it sat the attendee list, the flight file, the rooming list, and the transfer schedule. Each one accurate on its own. None of them aware of the others.

The work was not the data entry. The work was reconciliation. Every change in one file created rework in three others, and the only thing holding the four together was somebody's attention.

Budget, attendees, flights, room distribution, transfer assignments. Keeping all of it upright, in A1's own description, was a tightrope act: one wobble anywhere and the number reported yesterday was no longer true.

Client communication ran on WhatsApp threads and email chains. Decisions were made and approvals were given, and both lived in a conversation rather than in the file they affected.

The Week Before: Ten People, Thousands of Flights

Because the project ran across so many months, A1's team on it was fluid, a few people for long stretches and more when a deadline landed. In the weeks before the event, it peaked at ten.

Ten people reconfirming thousands of flights. Ten people checking, name by name, that no attendee was about to land in a city without a hotel room or without a transfer waiting. That check has to be exhaustive, because the failure mode is not an error message on a screen. It is a person standing at an airport at midnight.

The event was delivered well. It was also exhausting, and the exhaustion did not come from the event. It came from the spreadsheets underneath it.

2025: The Same Event, With Everything Tied Together

In 2025 the event repeated. The same months of preparation, the same budget cycle, the same ticketing window, the same checks. What changed is that all of it was tied together inside Pypo.

The budget updates itself. Every approved service writes straight into the budget, so the number on the screen is the number as of the last approval, not as of the last time someone remembered to update a cell.

Travel services belong to people. A flight, a room, and a transfer are not rows in three separate files, they hang off the attendee they belong to. Someone missing one of them shows up as a visible gap, rather than being discovered by a manual cross-check in the final week.

Flights update live. Real-time flight status turned transfer management from a guessing game into an operational one: when an inbound flight moves, the transfer tied to it moves with it, before anyone is left waiting at the curb.

Three People at Peak

At the height of delivery in 2025, A1's team on the event was three people. The other seven were not idle. They were running other events. That is the part of the number that matters commercially: the same operation delivered with far less of the agency's capacity locked up in reconciliation work.

"Our clearest productivity comparison with Pypo was an event with around 1,500 attendees. In 2024, it took ten people from our team the entire week before the event to keep everything under control in spreadsheets. In 2025, we ran the same event with three people using Pypo. The gain in control and productivity is remarkable."

Daniela Mazzochi — Operations Director, a1.com.vc

For A1, the second run was the one without the background dread: no cold sweat over a number that might have gone stale, no fear of something quietly lost in the tangle of spreadsheets.

What Actually Changed

Nothing about the event got easier. Same 1,500 attendees, same three hotels, same nine-month runway, same thousands of flight segments. What changed is where the truth lived.

On spreadsheets, the truth was spread across four files plus one person's memory of which was current. In Pypo it sits in one place and updates itself as the work happens. The difference between ten people and three is what you stop paying for once the reconciliation work disappears.

Key Takeaways

• A1, a travel management company, ran the logistics for roughly 1,500 attendees at one of Brazil's largest marketing events twice: in 2024 on spreadsheets, and in 2025 on Pypo. Same event, same scale, two different operations.
• The project runs about nine months: budget from February, room blocks across three hotels from March, ticket issuance from August, event in November.
• In 2024, reconciling budget, attendees, flights, rooming, and transfers across separate files created constant rework, and the team peaked at ten people the week before the event, reconfirming thousands of flights and checking attendee by attendee for a missing room or arrival transfer.
• In 2025, the budget updated automatically on each approved service, every travel service was linked to the attendee it belonged to, and live flight tracking drove transfer decisions.
• Peak team in 2025 was three people, freeing the other seven for other events, a productivity gain A1's operations director calls remarkable.

Published with A1's permission. The end client and the event are not named.