The Challenge

Cortex, a Series C enterprise software company backed by Sequoia, IVP, and Scale Venture Partners, is the leading platform for engineering excellence—empowering the world’s top engineering teams to drive a culture of ownership and deliver high-quality software with confidence. As the company experienced rapid growth, the Finance team needed to evolve its planning and reporting processes. Before Abacum, VP of Finance and Operations Evan Pincus managed FP&A via spreadsheets, with exports from Rippling (HRIS) and QuickBooks (GL) stitched together manually. This process was not only tedious, but quickly became outdated as the company grew and evolved.

Forecasting headcount, the company’s largest expense, was especially problematic. With manual inputs, timing discrepancies, and stale data, it was difficult to trust the numbers or react quickly to changes. The team needed a solution that would centralize data, integrate with Rippling, and enable real-time planning with precision.

The Solution

Cortex selected Abacum based on three key criteria: fast time to value, ease of customization, and a powerful, flexible data model. Within just three months, Cortex had fully implemented Abacum, built their board plan in-platform, and was running monthly forecast reviews.

By integrating QuickBooks, Salesforce, Rippling, BigQuery, Tabs, Google Sheets and Excel into Abacum, the finance team gained real-time access to data across the business.

Use cases included:

• Monthly rolling forecasts

• Board-ready management reporting

• Scenario planning (e.g. accelerated hiring impact)

• Real-time variance analysis

• Renewals and sales capacity planning

• Departmental spaces for Sales, CX, Marketing, and Leadership

With Abacum’s Spaces, Evan created custom dashboards for each team, curating the metrics and views that mattered most to each audience.

The Impact

By adopting Abacum, Cortex achieved:

• Massive Efficiency Gains: What once took days or weeks now takes minutes. Forecasting, variance analysis, and scenario planning are now just a few clicks away.

• Trustworthy Headcount Forecasting: Rippling integration keeps people data current, enabling Cortex to forecast with confidence and track variances down to the individual level.

• Holistic Business Planning: Abacum connects functional models (Sales, CX, Hiring, Renewals) into a unified planning environment.

• AI-Enhanced Planning: Abacum’s AI tools, including anomaly detection and formula generation, have enabled faster, smarter reporting and decision-making.

• Lean, Strategic Finance: With a team of just two, Cortex built a sophisticated FP&A function that rivals companies twice their size.

The Conclusion

Abacum started as our FP&A tool — but it quickly became our operating system for how we plan and run the business. It’s now our single source of truth, powering faster, more informed decisions across the company.

As Evan puts it:

“Abacum has become our business planning engine. I bought it to be an FP&A tool, but it’s now our source of truth for all things planning… It’s spanned much wider than just the office of the CFO.”

And the results speak for themselves:

“Most companies our size have much larger finance organizations. We’ve stayed lean because of tools like Abacum… Instead of days or weeks on reporting, we spend minutes. And the rest of our time goes into driving the business forward.”