Alokai’s finance team shrank from five people to two while the company went through a major reset. With Abacum, they still run FP&A, close, cash and receivables across two entities. Budget owners track their own spend, and the team walks into board meetings without having to defend the numbers.
Company: Alokai, an AI-first e-commerce platform for multi-market, multi-store brands
Finance team: 2 people covering FP&A, month-end close, cash and receivables
Entities: US (QuickBooks) and Poland (Enova ERP)
CRM / AR: Salesforce (moving to HubSpot)
Abacum customer since: 2023, recently renewed
Featuring: Martyna Malicka, Financial Analyst
The results
Complex scenarios in days, not months. Finance can answer leadership’s questions while the decision is still open.
No more “are these numbers right?” Investors, the CEO and budget owners all work from the same live data.
Budget owners track their own spend. Department managers check their budgets and remaining funds in Abacum instead of asking finance.
Board prep is fully powered by Abacum data. No separate data consolidation or reconciliation is needed.
Cash burn categorization almost fully automated across tools, people costs, revenue and cost centers.
A small team operating with greater leverage. The team moved from manual data entry to decision support.
The context: a finance team that had to do more with less
Alokai is an enterprise commerce technology company helping brands build and scale modern e-commerce storefronts across markets, brands, and channels. Its platform sits between existing commerce backends and the customer-facing experience, making it easier to launch, manage, and evolve multiple storefronts without rebuilding the underlying stack.
Martyna owns FP&A, month-end close, cash operations and receivables, across a US entity and a Polish entity running on different systems. Investors still expect sharp, reliable reporting. And in a leaner company, every spending decision gets looked at more closely, so leadership needs answers faster than before.
For a team that size, there’s no room for a model you can’t trust or a process that needs someone to keep it running by hand.
The challenge: a fundraising model that had become a liability
Martyna and Dawid inherited one huge Google Sheets model. It had been built to support fundraising and track runway. By the time the company needed it to run the business, it had turned into a risk.
It broke under its own weight. The file crashed several times a day as more people used it. Every crash meant lost time and one more reason to doubt the output.
It couldn’t answer investors’ questions. Investors wanted clear ARR reporting. The model couldn’t produce it without hours of manual work.
Investor reporting came with a trust tax. Every data pack led to follow-up questions about where the numbers came from and whether they were right. Finance was spending its time defending figures instead of explaining what they meant.
Two entities, two systems, no single view. Bringing together a US entity on QuickBooks and a Polish entity on an older local ERP was a manual job every month.
“The model was built to raise a round, not to run a company. It crashed several times a day, and every time an investor asked about data we had to rebuild the answer by hand and then defend it.”
Why Abacum
In 2023, Alokai compared several FP&A platforms against what a small, hands-on finance team actually needed.
Headcount planning with real depth
For a people-intensive business, headcount planning is one of the biggest drivers of the financial plan. Hires, leavers, raises and cost-center moves all have to flow through to the P&L and to the runway. Other tools Alokai looked at couldn’t model headcount in that detail. Abacum could, so the people model was the first thing Martyna built.
Built for a company split across the US and Europe
Alokai has entities, teams and customers on both sides of the Atlantic. Abacum handled that multi-location setup well, and gave the Europe-based finance team support during its own working day, when close and board prep actually happen.
A model finance owns
Martyna has built Alokai’s models and formulas herself from day one. She doesn’t depend on consultants or outside implementers. For a two-person team, that matters: when the business changes, finance can change the model the same day, without waiting in someone else’s queue.
Implementation: getting the foundations right
Alokai’s rollout took around a year, and Martyna is open about why. There was an early push to build forecasts before actuals were flowing in. It didn’t work. The team reset, connected the source data first, and built the forecast on top of it.
Today, Abacum brings together:
QuickBooks for the US entity, with a standardized monthly report consistently exported and uploaded into Abacum
Enova for the Polish entity, loaded through a standard monthly report
Salesforce for receivables and payments, with HubSpot coming next
On top of that data sit the P&L, runway and headcount models. Actuals refresh with every monthly close, and receivables update weekly.
“Connect your actuals before you forecast anything. We learned that the hard way. But the structure we built in that first year has carried us through everything since.”
What changed
1. Winning back trust in the numbers
After years of a spreadsheet that crashed and threw errors, people at Alokai were wary of any new financial model, and there was some early pushback. Abacum won them over by being reliable: no random outages and no broken calculations.
Today it’s the one place managers, the CEO and investors go for numbers. Investors have their own space, shared through a link, so they see the same live data the team works from. There’s no export, no version to check, and no gap between what finance sees and what the board sees.
That has changed how Martyna works. She no longer has to defend where a number came from. Board prep and internal monthly reviews run entirely from Abacum, with customizable KPI cards and charts doing the visual work that used to mean hours of formatting tables.
“People had been burned by spreadsheets, so they were skeptical at first. Now nobody asks whether the numbers are right. Investors question the business, not the data, which is the conversation we want to have.”
2. From reporting to steering: scenarios in days
In a company working through a reset, the most valuable thing finance can give leadership is a fast, reliable answer to “what happens if…?” At Alokai, complex scenarios and custom requests used to take months. Now they take days, or a couple of weeks for the biggest ones.
That’s the difference between finance explaining a decision after it’s made and helping shape it while it’s still open.
3. Budget owners who don’t need to ask finance
With two people in finance, every “how much do I have left?” message costs time. At Alokai, department managers have their own spaces in Abacum where they track their budgets and remaining funds. When they need help, they come to finance with a real spending question, not a request for a report.
Budget accountability sits with the people spending the money, and finance becomes an advisor instead of a help desk.
4. Cash control without the manual categorization
When runway matters, finance needs to know exactly where cash is going every month. At most companies that means someone tagging transactions by hand.
Alokai uses Abacum’s AI Classifier to build its cash burn report. It automatically sorts spend into tool expenses, people costs, revenue and cost centers. Martyna trained it on Alokai’s own categories for about a year. Today the process is almost fully automated, which has sped up the monthly turnaround and moved her close time from tagging to analysis.
5. A revenue forecast grounded in what customers are doing
Alokai’s Customer Success team uses Abacum every week to track receivables, overdue invoices and upcoming payments, using the same KPIs finance does.
Once a month, finance and CS meet to review client health and adjust the forecast together. Overdue invoices come up before they become a cash problem. Renewal risk shows up in the forecast early. CS and finance work from one view of each account.
6. A lean team that doesn’t feel lean
Going from five people to two usually means cutting reporting, slowing the close or both. Alokai did neither. With connected data, automated categorization and self-serve access for budget owners and investors, the finance team’s work has moved away from manual data entry and toward decision-making. Two people cover FP&A, close, cash and receivables across two entities, and still have time for the strategic work.
What other finance teams can take from Alokai
Connect actuals before you forecast. A forecast is only as credible as the data under it.
Start with the model that drives your plan. For Alokai, that was people, so the people model came first.
Earn trust by being reliable. Stakeholders burned by spreadsheets come round when the numbers are right every time.
Push visibility out to budget owners. Self-serve budget tracking saves finance time and makes spending decisions better.
Train your AI on your own logic. The AI Classifier got better as it learned Alokai’s categories. The upfront effort paid off.
Bring other teams in. Pulling CS into the forecast made it more accurate and made finance more useful to the business.
A partnership that keeps improving
Martyna speaks highly of the whole Abacum team: the implementation team, her CSMs (Paul, and Isabella before him), and the speed of ticket responses. Alokai has monthly syncs with its CSM and gets fast replies on Slack. Martyna has seen the product requests she raised turn into features over time. More recently she’s been testing the AI space builder to spin up new spaces quickly as reporting needs change.
That track record is why Alokai recently renewed with Abacum.
“When we ask for something, the Abacum team listens, and we’ve seen our requests become real features. That’s a big part of why we renewed.”
