Customer Story

How Yoco doubled their reporting output without adding new headcount

Faced with unscalable stakeholders demands for reporting and little time for financial planning, Yoco’s strategic finance team turned to Abacum to transform their FP&A process.

🎯 Industry

FinTech

📏 Company Size

350+

🏷 Tech Stack

Netsuite

“What attracted us immediately was that the Abacum team would help us onboard onto the platform and we were a very small finance team at the time.

A week or two later they took us through what our new reporting looked like on the Abacum platform.

We were sold.”

Pieter Hugo, FP&A Manager

Pieter Hugo, Yoco

Yoco is an African technology company.

They create opportunities for entrepreneurs to get paid and be more successful. Every day, they break down barriers and create access so that more businesses can participate in the economy and thrive.

Due to their ambitious growth plans, they sought to transform their FP&A processes to scale their output, accuracy and planning capabilities.

Yoco’s key metrics

Doubled reporting output

With fewer manual tasks, the finance team increased the depth and granularity of reporting.

3+ days saved reporting

Automatically syncing data has removed manual processes and given finance increased agility.

Faster risk mitigation

Real-time insights enable finance to see cost deviations sooner and react faster.

Key value points

1. Doubled reporting output in less time

Abacum slashed reporting cycles by over 3 days, enabling Yoco to double reporting requirements without expanding their team.

Yoco considers the price of Abacum to be more than offset by the cost saving of delaying hiring and enabling their existing team to do more.

2. Real-time visibility

Access to real-time data facilitated deeper insights, enabling Yoco to identify trends and drivers promptly and take action.

Fixes to improve revenue performance or mitigate costs can be implemented within days, instead of 30 days, at the end of the reporting cycle.

3. Improved collaboration and decision-making

Abacum is a real-time single source-of-truth for collaborative budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, fostering alignment across departments, stakeholders and investors.

Yoco’s strategic finance team has the capacity to build more complexity into their reporting to improve the business’s understanding of performance.

This combination of more granular, quicker decision making has helped the company save significant costs.

4. Automated forecasting

Abacum gives Yoco the ability to update forecasts automatically every month without having to update large spreadsheets.

Yoco can now manage complex cohort analyses about retention and real-time forecasting, providing an in-depth perspective on the forecasting period based on recent performance.

Low productivity

Yoco grappled with labor-intensive reporting procedures, relying on manual data entry across multiple platforms. This hindered deeper analysis and timely decision-making.

Manual imports

“Our monthly reporting used to be on Google Sheets. We manually copied our results from Xero to a Google sheet where we analyzed our actuals against our budget. Our customer data was extracted from our data warehouse, imported into Tableau where we did analyses.”

Inefficient process

“It was a very long process and given our time constraints, there were so many unanswered questions because the process was so inefficient and didn’t allow us to do deeper analyses within the time.”

Onboarding experience

“Most finance teams experience poor onboarding and are conditioned to be skeptical of onboarding processes.”

“Our experience with the Abacum team has been incredible from the start. The team always goes above and beyond.”

“Abacum made sure the implementation was done quickly with very little effort from our side.”

Ongoing support

“Recently we implemented Netsuite and again, the Abacum team was incredibly helpful in getting us integrated very quickly. Maria took care of everything.”

Primary use-case

Partnering with Abacum, Yoco streamlined their FP&A workflows, consolidating data sources and automating tedious tasks into one centralized source of truth.

One source-of-truth

“We use the platform for internal monthly reporting, analysis, budgeting and forecasting across a number of our teams (we’re rolling this out to the entire team over time), and our rolling forecast.”