The Challenge

As Carwow scaled its business — expanding its product offering, headcount, and market presence — the finance team struggled to keep pace. Their processes, built around complex Excel models, became increasingly fragile and time-consuming. Managing budgets, forecasts, and monthly management accounts meant reconciling data manually, distributing numbers through Google Sheets, and spending significant time addressing questions.

For Jean-Claude Mustill, Director of FP&A, this wasn’t sustainable.

“We’d grown quite substantially over the last few years… and invariably that comes with larger, more complicated models,” he explains.

These models were open to manual errors and required significant effort from the team to align data and produce consistent reports for the business. Even with accurate numbers, the process often slowed down decision-making:

“We don’t want to be a blocker of people’s time,” he adds, “but people were asking all the questions — where’s this number from, I don’t recognize that number.”

The limitations of Excel, combined with the need to integrate seamlessly into Carwow’s Google Workspace environment, highlighted the need for a new FP&A platform: one that could deliver accuracy, transparency, and efficiency at scale.

The Solution

Carwow undertook a rigorous evaluation of FP&A solutions, seeking a platform that was robust enough to handle their complexity, but intuitive enough to build stakeholder trust. Importantly, as a Google-first organization, they needed a solution that avoided forcing Excel workflows on the rest of the business.

Abacum quickly stood out as the right fit.

“We’re a Google Suite first organization. Most of the big players are more Excel-faced, and we wanted to avoid dragging the business into Excel,” says Jean-Claude.

Abacum provided that compatibility, as well as the right level of sophistication for a company of Carwow’s size and complexity — striking what Jean-Claude calls “a natural middle place.”

Beyond functionality, the experience with the Abacum team gave Carwow confidence they were making the right choice. From the first conversations to the rollout, the team impressed with their responsiveness, expertise, and understanding of Carwow’s business needs.

“You just felt you were in safe hands,” Jean-Claude recalls. Implementation was completed in just six to eight weeks, even spanning the holiday period, and Jean-Claude noted that “the tool’s pretty intuitive” once you understand the basic flows and architecture.

Post-implementation, Abacum’s support continued to exceed expectations. Jean-Claude admits he was skeptical about relying on a ticketing system for help, but quickly found the team “genuinely care… regularly getting responses within a couple of hours”, giving him confidence that support was always there when needed.

The Impact

Since implementing Abacum, Carwow’s finance team has experienced a step-change in how it operates and partners with the business.

First and foremost, Abacum established a reliable single source of truth for all stakeholders, with consistent, reconciled data feeding both financial models and management accounts. This overcomes the challenges associated with the Excel and Google Sheets process.

With Abacum, the team can now produce management accounts and business-unit-specific P&Ls much faster and more accurately, while maintaining control and visibility over every number. Updating actuals and rolling forward the model is as simple as clicking a button — a dramatic improvement over their previous process.

Perhaps most significantly, Abacum has enabled more meaningful conversations between finance and the rest of the business.

“The outcome is more questions,” says Jean-Claude, “but much more value-add questions. There are fewer questions about where a number came from, and more about what’s really driving it.”

Finance has gone from being a gatekeeper of numbers to being a true partner in understanding and driving performance. Visibility and accountability across the business have improved as a result, creating a culture where everyone is on the same page and focused on the right metrics.

Conclusion

For Carwow, Abacum has been more than just a platform — it’s been a partner in transforming the finance function. By combining Google-first compatibility, intuitive design, and outstanding support, Abacum has helped Carwow mature its processes and relationships with stakeholders.

As Jean-Claude sums it up:

“It’s forced in a culture which we try and embody, but now we have the right tools to actually implement it.”

With better visibility, faster insights, and a team they trust, Carwow’s finance function is finally operating at the pace of the business — and driving it forward.