Abacum makes it seamless to gather budget inputs from across the business. Whether it's marketing, sales, or any other department, you can build dedicated spaces where stakeholders review actuals, submit their requests, and track approvals—while you keep full control of the workflow, permissions, and audit trail.

No more chasing inputs over email or wondering who changed what—just a structured, governed budgeting process that's simple for stakeholders and transparent for finance.

Key Benefits for Finance Teams

With Abacum's budgeting spaces and workflows, you can:

• Roll up inputs from every department into one admin space with P&L views, heat maps, and pivotable tables

• Control the workflow with space statuses—open input periods when you need them, lock them when you don't

• Give stakeholders a simple, guided experience with filtered views showing only what's relevant to them

• Create department subspaces automatically—build the space once and duplicate it across any dimension

• Trace every change with an AI-powered audit trail, right inside the platform or through your own LLM via MCP

How to Run Collaborative Budgeting: Step-by-Step Process

1. Set Up Your Admin Space

Start from the finance admin's view, where all department inputs roll up. Build the views you need—a working forecast over your P&L, heat maps splitting expenses by entity and department, tables sorted by top vendors, or waterfall views—and pivot them by any dimension.

2. Create Department Subspaces Automatically

Instead of building a space per department, create it once and use dimension-based duplication. Pick a dimension—like department—and Abacum duplicates the content with the right filters applied, generating every department space automatically. You can also start from a template with AI Spaces: write a prompt, get a working space, and build from there.

3. Govern the Workflow with Statuses

Each subspace has a status that controls what users can do. While a space is "in progress," department heads can make budget or headcount requests. Once the period closes, that permission is removed—they can still access the space and comment, but no requests slip in outside the window.

4. Give Stakeholders a Simple, Guided Experience

Department heads follow a clear workflow: review actuals against budget, comment on variances (for example, anything above 20%), enter their inputs directly in the table, and track what's been approved, pending, or rejected—with comments explaining why. You can enrich their space with what matters to them, like marketing funnel impact and return on spend down to the vendor level.

5. Review Requests and Trace Every Change

Back in the admin space, action the requests coming in from each department. For the audit trail, just ask the agent—"What changes have been made to the forecast?"—and get the full changelog: previous values, new values, dimensions, and who made each change, so you understand not just what changed but why. Department heads can do the same for their own changes, and if you connect through MCP to your LLM of choice, you can pull the same audit report there.