1. The Challenge

Strava is a consumer subscription business known for tracking 50 activity types including running and cycling, while also supporting community features like clubs, challenges, and route discovery powered by millions of athlete data points.

From a finance perspective, Brian Miller, who leads FP&A at Strava, faced growing challenges managing budgeting, forecasting, and reporting with a combination of spreadsheets and a legacy financial planning system. The existing setup required extensive manual work, offered limited flexibility, and lacked reliable integrations with Strava’s ERP.

Beyond ERP limitations, the team needed to connect additional data sources that included the HRIS and the data warehouse to enable deeper analysis and support more granular forecasting. At the same time, collaborating with department budget owners on budget versus actuals was cumbersome, fragmented, and difficult to scale.

Strava needed a solution that could reduce manual effort, support multiple data integrations, and make forecasting and reporting faster and more accessible across the organization.

2. The Solution

After evaluating several FP&A tools, Strava selected Abacum for its flexibility, scalability, and implementation approach.

According to Brian, Abacum offers the right balance between power and usability. The platform allowed the team to push data flexibly from their ERP, integrate with HRIS and the data warehouse, and model forecasts at a level of detail that was not achievable with their previous tools.

A key differentiator was Abacum’s space-based approach, which enabled the FP&A team to:

• Give department budget owners controlled access to their own views.

• Customize reporting by function, GL account, or scenario.

• Duplicate and reuse planning structures across departments without maintaining multiple spreadsheets.

Strava now uses Abacum for:

• In-year budget vs. actuals reporting, with direct participation from budget owners.

• Personnel and non-personnel cost forecasting, both for the current fiscal year and longer-range, multi-year planning.

• Quarterly reforecasting, with the ability to roll forward scenarios quickly and adjust assumptions as needed

3. The Results

Since implementing Abacum, Strava has established a centralized, streamlined financial planning environment that supports both reporting and forecasting at scale.

Monthly budget reporting is now completed 2 days faster, and rolling new forecasts or budgets for comparison delivers similar time savings. Over the course of a year, this translates into multiple days saved across the FP&A team, particularly as ad hoc questions arise around monthly, quarterly, or annual performance.

Beyond speed, the team benefits from:

• A single, consolidated system instead of numerous spreadsheets

• Faster updates when adding new departments or GL accounts

• Greater flexibility for a business that changes frequently

• Improved ability to analyze expenses and performance across functional splits

As Brian summarizes, the core value of Abacum for Strava is “a consolidated single source of truth that allows you to both report and forecast.”

4. Looking Ahead

Looking toward 2026, Strava plans to expand its use of Abacum beyond expense planning. While the platform is already central to cost forecasting, the team sees an opportunity to bring revenue forecasting and planning into Abacum as well, supporting both Strava’s core subscription business and its growing B2B revenue streams.