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Customer Story
Moneybox’s journey to automating budgeting and reporting with Abacum
🎯 Industry
Fintech
📏 Company Size
400+
🏷 Tech Stack
Netsuite, Moss & PowerBI
Who are Moneybox?
Moneybox is an award winning app which helps over 1 million people turn their money into something greater. Based in the UK, they are one of the fastest growing organizations in the UK tech landscape. Alex Jacobs is Senior Commercial Finance Manager at Moneybox.
The challenge
Inefficiency of manual reporting processes
For a period of time, Alex was the primary finance professional within Moneybox, tasked with handling all of their reporting within spreadsheets. However, when they started to expand the team, “it just became impossible to collaborate on things at the same time.”
With their Excel operation inaccessible to non-finance stakeholders, Alex and his team quickly found themselves bogged down with manual reporting, looking into discrepancies between spreadsheets in the absence of a single source of truth.
“One of our biggest pain points before Abacum was reporting against the budget. The process was slow (taking 3 working days to produce), the data quality was often lacking, and it was challenging to deliver reports in a timely manner.”
Alex knew things had to change, that they needed to automate their reporting and establish a stakeholder friendly source of truth if they were going to add lasting value to supporting Moneybox’s ambitious growth targets.
The results from our collaboration were clear…
Reduced reporting time by 90%
Resulting in faster access to crucial data and insights.
Reduced reporting meetings by 50%
By creating more transparent data-sharing methods, allowing for better time management.
Created a self-serve culture for insights
By empowering them to make informed decisions without relying heavily on external support.
The Solution
Moneybox chose Abacum over other providers
When it came to evaluating FP&A solutions, Moneybox had a rigorous criteria that covered stakeholder needs from across the business, taking the view of looking for a solution that would add value over the long term.
“One of the key things we were looking for was dashboards that were really easy to consume and understand by non-finance teams. Within finance, we deal with lots of tables of numbers and maybe that’s okay for us, but we wanted something where other teams can log into their dashboards and only see information relevant to them.”
The other key criteria was a personalized onboarding process. We only had a small team here at Moneybox at the time so we wanted to be able to work closely with any potential provider to learn and ensure we could build everything ourselves, while maintaining that continuous personalized support.
And that’s what we found with Abacum, a clean powerful dashboarding UI, a really great onboarding process and a partner that we can work closely with where we feel supported.”
The biggest and quickest ROI we’ve seen from Abacum has been in automating our basic month-end cost reporting requirements. To contextualize, month end reporting would take up to 3 working days. Now, we reduced it to half a working day.
Alex Jacobs,
Senior Commercial Finance Manager at Moneybox
What is the impact of Abacum across Moneybox?
1. Streamlined headcount planning process
Alex said during the interview that “a specific area we have seen an impact is headcount and payroll reporting. Abacum has really reduced the time taken for headcount planning during the budget season as heads of departments already know their headcount data and relevant costs.
Abacum has strict access controls which means we can safely share headcount reports with the correct stakeholders and provide quick insights around BvA variances to dive into the reasons behind variances.
This means teams can self-serve and access their payroll data easily themselves, in real-time, eliminating the need for monthly reporting meetings and freeing up time for them and for me.”
2. Reduced the number of reporting meetings
Before Abacum, reporting took 3 days to prepare and then an additional hour per department head to walk through performance.
Now that every department head has a real time dashboard with performance data, they’ve reduced the number of internal meetings by 50%, saving significant value.
Any meetings that Alex does have with heads of department are now focused on solving a specific challenge, which has helped improve the relationship between finance and these non-finance stakeholders.
“Feedback about Abacum has been wholly positive and our stakeholders now have greater confidence in the reports and forecasts we provide, allowing them to make more informed decisions.
This improved trust has directly driven business performance by enabling faster, more accurate financial planning and analysis.”
3. Driven business growth through LTV analysis
“We’ve shifted our focus from routine reporting and now we can look at more strategic initiatives and we’ve really played a critical role in helping business growth through that because we’ve had time to build really robust cohort models that are looking at market trends, incorporating scenario analysis and looking forward one, two years, even five, ten years ahead.
He even says, “another great example of this is, we launched a new product 12 months ago and with the time saving, we were able to analyze the LTV of our customers at a deeper level now, rather than just providing LTV numbers, which really adds value to various teams in the business, particularly marketing.
Better decisions have been made in the marketing team based on the additional analysis of LTV, which ultimately leads to faster business growth and higher return on investment.”
Customer Obsession
From onboarding to ongoing support
“The support from Abacum’s tech team has been superb really. They’ve been with us every step of the way from onboarding, but also importantly the ongoing assistance that we’ve had over the last 12 to 18 months.
Ultimately Abacum has provided our entire business with real-time access to financial data. That in turn is crucial for informed strategic decision making. Overall, I’d say it’s a really invaluable tool for any company looking to optimize their financial planning and analysis.”
For any ambitious, high growth business with a small but mighty finance team, investing in Abacum is your way to unlock the strategic potential and add value to every single stakeholder in your business.
