Overview

As Upvest scaled following its Series C funding, the complexity of financial planning, forecasting, investor reporting, and revenue modeling increased significantly.

While Excel and Google Sheets had successfully supported the company through its early stages, the strategic finance team recognized that spreadsheets alone would not provide the scalability, flexibility, and collaboration required for the next phase of growth.

By implementing Abacum, Upvest accelerated reporting cycles, improved investor communication, streamlined planning workflows, and built a scalable FP&A foundation capable of supporting a rapidly evolving fintech business.

About Upvest

Upvest is a Berlin-based fintech that provides modular, API-first investment infrastructure for financial institutions.

Its platform enables clients to embed investment products such as stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and other investment offerings directly into their applications while Upvest manages the underlying trading, custody, and regulatory infrastructure.

As the business expanded, finance became responsible for increasingly sophisticated investor reporting, forecasting, scenario planning, board reporting, and revenue modeling requirements.

The Challenge

When Chelsea Thomson joined Upvest in late 2024, the company's planning and reporting infrastructure relied heavily on Excel and Google Sheets.

Over time, the financial model had become increasingly complex:

• Multiple entity-level models consolidated into large workbooks

• Longer load times and growing reconciliation requirements

• Increasing collaboration across finance and business teams

• New products and clients creating additional forecasting complexity

• Manual investor reporting processes dependent on spreadsheets

The company's revenue model added another layer of complexity. Revenue depended on end-user trading activity, while every client had unique products, customer behavior patterns, and growth assumptions.

As Upvest expanded into new investment products, including mutual funds and money market funds, even small structural changes often required updates across multiple interconnected spreadsheets.

"We wanted to optimize our setup so that structural changes could be executed seamlessly, matching the rapid pace of the business."

Investor reporting presented similar challenges. Actuals were manually downloaded from NetSuite, account mappings were updated each month, and finance spent significant time validating numbers to ensure reporting accuracy.

"We dedicated substantial time to detailed checking, and our goal was to automate these baseline workflows to free up bandwidth for strategic analysis."

Why Upvest Chose Abacum

Upvest launched a formal FP&A platform evaluation with several priorities:

• Ease of implementation and maintenance

• Flexible scenario planning

• Multi-entity reporting support

• Cross-functional collaboration

• Long-term scalability

A key requirement was maintaining ownership of the model internally.

"We wanted a platform where we could make changes ourselves, quickly and without friction."

According to Chelsea, Abacum distinguished itself through its willingness to engage deeply with the company's unique complexity.

"The can-do attitude really stood out."

As the evaluation progressed, Upvest continued introducing increasingly sophisticated planning requirements. The Abacum team consistently demonstrated practical solutions and tailored approaches to address those challenges.

"I kept bringing more complexity and more problems, and the team kept showing us how we could solve them."

That collaborative partnership gave Upvest confidence that Abacum could evolve alongside the business.

Life with Abacum

Upvest initially focused on two primary use cases:

• Investor reporting

• Budgeting and forecasting

Within weeks of implementation, the finance team had:

• Integrated Abacum with NetSuite

• Automated actuals synchronization

• Built budget versus actual reporting workflows

• Reduced manual account mapping work

Faster Investor Reporting

The impact was immediate.

Prior to Abacum, investor reporting often required more than a week following accounting close. Today, the process takes approximately two to three days.

"We've drastically reduced the number of days we need to close. I'm talking like 75% faster."

Upvest now manages investor reporting directly within Abacum. Instead of manually building reporting packages in Google Slides, the team:

• Creates investor reporting spaces in Abacum

• Generates PDF reports directly from the platform

• Shares narrative commentary alongside reporting

• Provides visibility into selected metrics

The result is a faster, more reliable reporting process with significantly less manual effort.

Supporting a Flexible Revenue Model

As Upvest's revenue model continues evolving, portions of revenue forecasting remain in Google Sheets.

Abacum's flexibility allows those models to feed directly into the broader planning environment, creating a hybrid workflow that balances customization with centralized reporting.

"A lot of companies worry their model isn't in a final steady state yet. The hybrid setup lets us keep evolving while still getting the benefits of the platform."

Expanding Visibility Across the Organization

More recently, Upvest expanded Abacum beyond finance.

By integrating operational KPIs from BigQuery, teams across the organization now gain better visibility into performance against targets and budgets.

Departments can:

• Monitor operational KPIs

• Track performance against budget

• Identify performance gaps

• Make more informed decisions

"We're trying to bring visibility to the rest of the organization and help teams make decisions using KPIs."

Results

Reporting Cycles Reduced from Over a Week to 2–3 Days

Before Abacum:

• Manual reporting workflows

• Extensive data validation requirements

• Investor reporting took more than a week after close

Today:

• Investor reporting completed in approximately 2–3 days

• Actuals sync automatically from NetSuite

• Dramatically less manual reconciliation

• Greater confidence in reporting accuracy

Hours Saved Every Reporting Cycle

Upvest estimates that automation saves:

• 3–4 hours per month on actuals imports and updates

• Approximately two full days during budget roll-forward processes

Processes that previously required rebuilding and maintaining interconnected spreadsheets are now significantly streamlined.

Faster Investor and Due Diligence Responses

During a recent funding extension process, Upvest used Abacum to quickly respond to investor diligence requests.

With reporting and scenario planning centralized, the team could rapidly adjust assumptions and produce updated analyses.

"We managed to answer diligence questions really quickly and close the round in record time."

Greater Trust in the Numbers

Perhaps the most significant outcome has been confidence.

By automating foundational reporting processes and reducing manual work, finance can focus more time on:

• Strategic planning

• Forecasting

• Business partnering

• Investor communication

• Decision support

Looking Ahead

As Upvest continues growing, the company plans to expand its use of Abacum across the organization.

Key priorities include:

• Broader KPI reporting adoption

• Expanded scenario planning workflows

• Greater operational visibility

• Increased use of AI-enabled workflows and integrations

By replacing spreadsheet-driven processes with a scalable FP&A foundation, Upvest has positioned finance to operate with greater speed, visibility, and confidence as the business continues to scale.