About Coffman Engineers

Coffman Engineers is a multidisciplinary engineering consulting firm serving commercial, institutional, government, healthcare, energy, and industrial markets across the United States and internationally.

The company operates across 20+ offices and is recognized as an ENR Top 500 engineering firm, combining the local service model of a regional firm with the scale and capabilities of a national consultancy.

Its business model is highly decentralized, with individual offices operating with significant autonomy while leadership maintains visibility across regional performance, utilization, and profitability.

To support long-term growth and operational scale, Coffman modernized its finance and operations stack around:

• ERP: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance / Finance & Operations (F&O)

• FP&A Platform: Abacum

• Data Integration: Fivetran pulling data from F&O into Abacum

This supports planning, reporting, and forecasting across finance, operations, and leadership teams.

1. The Challenge

When Spencer Fox joined Coffman Engineers, the company had limited FP&A infrastructure in place.

• Budgeting and reporting lived in Excel

• Data required custom SQL pulls

• Forecasting was infrequent and difficult to maintain

• Actual reporting took 20-30 days after month-end close before teams could see meaningful results

• Insights were difficult to scale across a decentralized structure of 20+ offices and multiple disciplines

Even simple analyses, like comparing office performance or validating profitability, required exporting data into spreadsheets, manually checking formulas, and reconciling reports against multiple systems.

There was also significant time spent validating whether numbers tied back to the “source of truth,” often pulling finance teams away from higher-value strategic work.

“It was very manual. Numbers weren’t always tying, and there wasn’t much engagement in updating forecasts.”

The result: reporting was backward-looking, static, and difficult to trust.

2. The Solution

Coffman implemented Abacum to centralize planning, reporting, and forecasting across the business.

Several factors made Abacum the right fit:

Native connection to F&O

The ability to integrate directly with Microsoft Dynamics F&O through Fivetran was a major selling point. This created a cleaner, more reliable data flow into FP&A.

Fast implementation timeline

Unlike legacy platforms that required year-long implementations, Abacum could be deployed in 2–3 months, allowing Coffman to complete its 2026 budgeting cycle in the new platform rather than waiting through another year of legacy processes.

Built to scale

As Coffman grows, adding new offices, departments, or accounts is straightforward. Abacum’s dimensions structure automatically flags unmapped entities and makes it easy to extend models without rebuilding infrastructure.

This flexibility was especially important compared to tools where adding new structure becomes increasingly difficult over time.

Co-build implementation approach

Rather than handing over a finished system, Abacum worked alongside the Coffman team to build the model together. This allowed internal stakeholders to learn the platform as they implemented it, making future maintenance, troubleshooting, and enhancements much easier.

“It wasn’t just implementation and then no one knows how to improve it. We built it together so we could learn as we went.”

Strategic implementation support

Working with Abacum’s implementation partner, Openvale Group (OVG), Coffman quickly deployed a model tailored to its regional, services-based structure.

OVG helped:

• Design a scalable data model across offices, departments, and engineers

• Apply best practices from similar finance transformations

• Accelerate rollout and time-to-value

• Prioritize enablement so Coffman could operate independently post-implementation — through training, guided builds, and documented instructions

• Leverage deep data management experience to navigate complex source data and transform it directly in Abacum

This ensured the foundation was built correctly for long-term growth, not just immediate reporting needs.

Life with Abacum: What Changed?

Today, Coffman uses Abacum as its operational planning layer across the business.

Dynamic modeling

Finance can analyze performance across any dimension without rebuilding reports:

• Office

• Department

• Engineer

• Region

• Profitability metrics

• Headcount efficiency

• Revenue and expenses per employee

Instead of a fixed set of metrics like utilization, bill rate, and net income, teams can now create and test new financial and non-financial KPIs as needed.

Weekly actuals

Instead of waiting weeks after close, teams now have visibility into performance through the prior week creating significantly faster decision-making.

“We now have actuals through last week. We never had that level of visibility before.”

Role-based access through Spaces

Abacum is structured around “parent spaces” and “child spaces”:

Parent spaces

• P&L

• Operations

• Budgeting

Child spaces

• Individual offices

This allows GMs to view only their office while executives and regional leaders can roll up to summary views or drill into specific teams.

Additional finance-specific spaces support:

• Balance sheet reporting

• Cash flow reporting

• Board reporting

• CFO and finance team workflows

This ensures every stakeholder sees the right information without compromising data integrity.

3. The Results

Faster, automated reporting

Before Abacum, finance teams regularly exported data into Excel just to validate numbers against source systems.

That validation process could take hours and often interrupted more strategic work.

Now, much of that manual reconciliation has been eliminated.

Instead of spending time asking, “Is this number right?”, teams can focus on asking, “What should we do next?”

The equivalent of adding 2 FP&A hires

Rather than simply saving hours, Abacum created work that previously wouldn’t have happened at all.

Coffman estimates the impact is equivalent to adding roughly two full-time finance positions without actually hiring them.

This includes:

• deeper office-level analysis

• engineer-level profitability insights

• scenario planning and what-if modeling

• tailored reporting for every GM and executive stakeholder

“It’s less about saving time and more about creating the equivalent value of adding two full-time positions.”

Every GM now feels like they have dedicated finance support for their office something that would have been nearly impossible to replicate through Excel, SharePoint, or manual reporting processes.

Better questions, not just faster answers

Abacum changed the nature of forecasting itself.

Previously, forecasting was largely a monthly exercise focused on updating current-month forecasts to match actuals.

Now, teams are moving toward true forward-looking planning:

• forecasting weekly instead of monthly

• planning ahead instead of updating history

• connecting office-level decisions to company-wide cash flow and strategic planning

This improves visibility into:

• strategic hiring decisions

• tenant improvements

• capital planning

• M&A readiness

• broader growth investments

A single source of truth across the business

Previously, the CFO, executives, and office leaders were often working from different views of the business.

Now, everyone works from the same P&L forecast and shared assumptions.

This creates stronger alignment across:

• office leadership

• regional managers

• executives

• board reporting

The same source of truth can support executive strategy discussions, GM accountability, and office-level performance management.

Cultural change toward accountability

Perhaps the biggest change has been behavioral.

Abacum is helping shift Coffman from rearview reporting to forward-looking operational planning.

Instead of checking reports once a month, teams are being encouraged to engage weekly and eventually daily.

That transition takes time, but it creates a much stronger operating rhythm.

“It’s making the business more collaborative, more about the numbers, and more forward-looking, not rearview looking.”

4. Looking Ahead

Coffman is continuing to expand its use of Abacum across the organization.

Next priorities include:

• adding a project-level dimension for deeper operational visibility

• increasing access for additional view-only stakeholders

• further connecting planning across P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow

• expanding forecasting and scenario planning workflows

Finance is no longer just reporting the business, it is helping shape it.

By creating a flexible, scalable FP&A foundation, Coffman has positioned finance as a strategic partner across every office and every level of leadership.