Every company eventually reaches a point where spreadsheets no longer cut it. They start missing budgets. The board asks more complex questions. Department leaders need real-time metrics. This occurs as the underlying business complexity increases significantly with the scaling of the number of customers, products, or pricing models. The finance team is buried, stitching together models and actuals from half a dozen disconnected systems.
That’s when companies realize they need an FP&A platform.
This is not a new story. Oracle, SAP, and IBM dominated the on-premises era in the eighties and nineties, which served only the largest enterprises.
With the rise of the cloud, Anaplan (acquired by Thoma Bravo for $10.4B in 2022) and Adaptive (acquired by Workday for $1.5B in 2018) helped finance move online. While these were successful businesses, neither tool was loved. Both required massive implementation projects, in-house technical dedicated resources, or reliance on consultants. As organizations’ data volumes, complexity, and tech sprawl have only increased, these solutions have become even more challenged to meet the demands of modern finance organizations.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a new generation of companies emerge to modernize FP&A. Pigment has established itself as the enterprise leader, targeting the heart of Anaplan. Over the past five years, the midmarket was extremely noisy, but the dust has started to settle, with Abacum emerging as the winner and redefining what FP&A software means.
The massive opportunity for Abacum
Anaplan and Adaptive together support ~6,000 customers and generate over $1B in combined revenue. But here’s the surprising part: nearly 70% of the midmarket remains greenfield.
Why? Because even Adaptive, the incumbent midmarket solution, was never able to thoroughly penetrate it, given architectural constraints that required lengthy implementations, limited self-service capabilities, and a lack of true collaboration capabilities. As a result, adoption stalled, and most companies below the enterprise tier continued to use spreadsheets.
This is precisely where Abacum shines. It’s built for finance, but designed for the whole business. It’s modern, collaborative, and intuitive enough to drive adoption beyond the CFO’s office, while striking the perfect balance between enterprise-grade functionality and the ease of use for a midmarket company.
Instead of a year-long painful implementation, the timeline takes weeks. What starts as a finance tool often expands across Sales, CX, Engineering, and department heads, who use it for planning, tracking, and alignment.
Abacum isn’t just replacing legacy tools; it’s pushing the boundaries of what finance teams can achieve.
Abacum has been AI-first since day 1
AI is transforming every function and industry, and finance is no exception. Across the CFO stack, we’re seeing meaningful adoption in areas such as accounting, Q2C, accounts payable (AP), and procurement. However, FP&A occupies a uniquely strategic position.
It’s the connective tissue of the finance org, integrating data from the GL, ERP, HRIS, CRM, billing systems, and payroll. Unlike point solutions focused on a single workflow, FP&A provides a comprehensive view of the entire financial picture.
That centrality, owning the budgets, forecasts, and performance decisions that shape a company’s direction, is what makes FP&A the natural hub for AI in finance. It’s where automation, intelligence, and collaboration can drive the most significant impact.
AI can replace hours or days of manual board and executive reporting. Simply upload historical examples, and it provides the data and context to generate real insights that get you 80% of the way there. No need to spend weeks building detailed forecasts—AI can quickly generate first-pass projections, especially for non-critical items such as rent or software, freeing up time for more in-depth analyses. Instead of starting new models from scratch, teams can use natural language to guide an AI copilot in setting up the structure, assumptions, and logic.
These tools are already supercharging collaboration beyond the finance org. With AI-powered chat interfaces, budget owners no longer have to guess at reports or bug the finance team. They have their own personal AI finance query engine.
While implementation today is a far cry from the year-long Anaplan and Adaptive days, there is still room for improvement. Can AI fully automate data mapping, report generation, and initial model setup? That’s a massive step change, meaning even shorter time to value.
In many organizations, FP&A teams also handle categorization, anomaly detection, and reconciliation—work that no one enjoys. If AI can take on transaction mapping, misclassification detection, data standardization, and anomaly flagging, finance teams can shift from number crunchers to true strategic drivers.
AI is only as powerful as the foundation on which it runs. In FP&A, this means owning the system of record, where clean data resides, plans are built, scenarios are modeled, and decisions are made. It is clear that we’re still the early days of AI being a game changer here, and Abacum is leading the charge!
Scale loves the CFO Stack
At Scale, we’ve long believed the CFO stack is one of the most compelling categories in B2B software. It’s deeply embedded, mission-critical, and still full of legacy systems and manual workflows waiting to be replaced. This is a horizontal category that every business, in every industry, needs.
Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to partner with Bill.com, Monto, Klarity, and Papaya Global. These platforms have redefined how finance teams work across AR, AP, Accounting, and Payroll. We couldn’t be more excited to now partner with Julio and Jorge as they reinvent FP&A.
