Voicemod: Transforming Business Partnering with Collaborative FP&A

In need of a solution to align monthly budgets with 30+ budget owners, Voicemod benefitted from Abacum’s collaborative platform to turn non-finance stakeholders into regular users of a financial planning tool.

Voicemod is a real-time voice changer software that has become a key technology in the gaming and streaming industry. Founded in 2014 by brothers Jaime, Fernando, and Juan Bosch, Voicemod was a passion project brought about by their shared love for technology and music. It originally served as a B2C mobile app used in conjunction with their studio business. Since then, the company has shifted its focus to a desktop experience, raising over $8 million in funding and amassing over 28 million in user downloads.

Rapid growth leads to a complex budgeting process

Voicemod reached a stage of growth where over 30+ teams existed, each one with its own budgets and forecasts. After securing their Series A funding round in 2020, the finance team was tasked with presenting consolidated monthly reports to investors. However, with multiple budget owners, data alignment and consolidation became a tedious process. These tasks fell on Nerea de la Fuente, Voicemod’s Finance Controller, who needed a solution that could scale with their growth.

Nerea was responsible for managing the budgeting and forecasting models in spreadsheets, with each budget owner having their own document to manage. Each month, Nerea pulled together individual excel sheets from the different budget owners and then manually consolidated data into a single report. This tedious process wasted valuable time on manual data collection and prevented Nerea from working on more strategic planning initiatives.

Amplifying Nerea’s challenges were alignment gaps brought about by multiple sources of communication. Some conversations occurred through email, others in spreadsheets, and the rest in other various platforms.

Bringing budget owners into a single platform

Several factors made Abacum an attractive solution to ease Nerea’s pains. The intuitive design and usability made it easy for her and for her non-finance colleagues to adopt the platform quickly. But the most impactful differentiator was the built-in internal and external collaboration features.

Nerea was able to migrate Voicemod’s entire business model and build out workspaces that followed the company’s reporting structure and hierarchies. Workspaces were created for each budget owner, with view and edit permission granted specifically to them. Discussion, tasks and decisions were all happening in the platform. By bringing in all 30+ budget owners to work in Abacum, Nerea was no longer juggling multiple channels to prepare, align and close reporting data.

To take it one step further, rather than create a report presentation for investors, Voicemod’s CFO, Vicente Esteve, directly invited them to review and discuss the budget in Abacum.

“It’s great to have a tool that also serves the interests and needs of our investors. Abacum will provide them an easy way to view our performance and interact with us.”

Vicente Esteve, CFO

Organizational change management  led by finance

The immediate impact of implementing an FP&A solution was cutting monthly report preparation time from 2 days to half a day. The biggest win, however, was the efficiency of collaborating with the 30+ budget owners on aligning budget vs. actuals. Moreover, it was getting non-finance users to work regularly in a finance platform that really made a big difference, signifying that the investment in Abacum did not only benefit the finance team, but also the entire organization.

With a strategic finance platform process set-up and a platform that combined both financial and operational data, Nerea was now fully equipped to scale with Voicemod’s growth.