Abacum Is Rated Exemplary in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Financial Planning Emerging Providers

Abacum provides a cloud-based financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform targeted at finance and CFO organizations, focusing on planning, reporting, data integration and analytical support for finance teams that manage budgets, forecasts and performance reporting. The company was founded by former CFOs Julio Martinez and Jorge Lluch and is headquartered in New York City, with additional offices in London and Barcelona.

CFOs and FP&A organizations have a wealth of choice when it comes to dedicated planning and budgeting software. Despite the business benefits that enterprises can achieve from dedicated planning software, our research finds that more than half of enterprises rely on spreadsheets to manage their forecasting, planning and budgeting processes. Abacum is in a new class of financial planning software designed to provide FP&A groups with software that preserves their existing budgeting process, is easy to implement and maintain, and requires limited training, while eliminating the issues caused by using a personal productivity tool for an enterprise-wide process. These applications serve the specific needs of the FP&A organization in the finance department by streamlining modeling, data gathering, analysis and reporting to improve visibility and decision support across planning cycles.

Abacum was rated Exemplary in ISG’s 2025 Buyers Guide for Financial Planning Emerging Providers. This market category offers buyers an alternative to standalone spreadsheets but compared to dedicated business planning software offers greater simplification and ease of use. In doing so, these applications exclude many of the platform and customer experience elements ISG uses to evaluate software that supports more complex business planning that can integrate multiple operating and service business units. They are worth considering, especially for midsize enterprises, because they deliver measurable improvements in accuracy, control and productivity for finance teams seeking to modernize their approach to forecasting, planning and budgeting.

Abacum structures its offering as a single FP&A platform composed of several functional product areas rather than as separately licensed applications. Planning is presented as a core product area that addresses budgeting, forecasting and profit-and-loss planning. Reporting is positioned as a dedicated product area focused on financial reporting for finance teams. The platform also includes a business intelligence capability, as well as dedicated data store with built-in data integration capabilities, covering the ingestion, modeling and synchronization of data from multiple source systems. Abacum also offers an Excel Connector to serve as a bridge between spreadsheet-based financial models and the Abacum platform. Security is presented as a distinct product area addressing compliance and data protection requirements.

Abacum’s focus is on planning and budgeting as a primary capability area. The platform supporting budgets, forecasts, and profit-and-loss planning processes. It positions these capabilities as enabling finance teams to model scenarios, manage assumptions, and update forecasts on an ongoing basis. Reporting is another core area, which can address a key weakness of standard spreadsheets. A spreadsheet works well for accounting tasks because these exist principally in two dimensions: line items (such as general ledger codes) and time (weeks, months, quarters and years). However, enterprises operate in multiple dimensions, including products, geographies, currencies and business units. Enabling a two-dimensional spreadsheet to report in business relevant contexts using pivot tables is time consuming and is a barrier to self-service reporting, diminishing the productivity of FP&A organizations.

Manual data integration into spreadsheets from source systems is similarly time consuming and impossible to synchronize, which often leads to disagreements over what the “right” numbers are in reporting and analyses. Data connectivity and integrations are a foundational element of the platform. Abacum states that it supports a large number of integrations across ERP, accounting, human resources, CRM, business intelligence, billing, data storage and spreadsheet systems. The software offers integrations through native connectors, partner-built integrations or internally created code. Abacum’s Excel Connector enables a two-way data exchange between Excel and the platform. This allows users to model in Excel while synchronizing assumptions, forecasts and results with Abacum.

In security and compliance Abacum states that it holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications and that it complies with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data privacy requirements under European Union (EU) laws.

Enterprises evaluating emerging financial planning platforms should prioritize providers that combine affordability with scalability and integration capability. Solutions with intuitive interfaces and AI-enabled automation can enhance accuracy, shorten budgeting cycles and reduce manual effort. Organizations should assess vendor stability, product roadmap clarity and customer support maturity to ensure long-term reliability. Selecting flexible platforms that evolve with business growth will help finance teams increase planning efficiency and advance digital maturity.