Christian Wattig recently opened his Abacum video series with a feeling every FP&A leader knows:
It’s 9:00 pm. You are about to send the board deck.
You change one cell in the model.
And everything breaks. Or worse, it doesn’t break, but the numbers are wrong.
This is not a skill problem.
It is not a diligence problem.
It is an architecture problem.
This is the moment many finance teams realize they have outgrown Excel.
The real issue is not spreadsheets. It is how they are being used.
Excel is powerful. Every finance team relies on it.
But as companies grow, spreadsheets quietly become responsible for something they were never designed to handle:
Running the financial nervous system of a company.
At a small scale, this works.
At a multi-entity, multi-system, multi-stakeholder scale, it creates:
Version control chaos
Broken links and fragile formulas
Manual consolidation across entities
CSV downloads and re-uploads every month
Endless board deck rebuilding
A finance team acting as data janitors instead of strategic partners
A better way to think about finance architecture
In the video, Christian shares a simple model that clicks immediately:
Source data → Model → Output
In most spreadsheets, these three layers are mixed together across dozens of tabs. In a modern FP&A platform like Abacum, they are separated and structured.
That single shift changes everything.
1) Source data is automated and mapped once
ERP, CRM, billing, HR systems flow into one place.
Multi-entity charts of accounts are mapped once, not every month.
2) The model holds the business logic
Instead of writing formulas in cells, you define logic once per metric.
Add a new entity, product, or dimension, and the logic cascades automatically.
3) Output becomes self-serve
Executives do not need a new spreadsheet or deck for every question.
They can explore the numbers themselves without breaking anything.
The trust gap: “Is this a black box?”
One of the biggest reasons teams hesitate to move beyond Excel is trust.
In Excel, you can click a cell and trace the formula.
Christian highlights how Abacum solves this with a dependency tree that shows exactly how every metric is calculated and where the data comes from.
It delivers what he calls:
“The audibility of Excel with the structure of a database.”
This is a glass box, not a black box.
What actually changes for the finance team
The goal is not just time savings.
The real shift is this:
From data janitor to strategic architect.
Instead of fixing broken models and reconciling data, finance teams can:
Run forecasts without duplicating models
Handle multi-entity consolidation automatically
Support executives with self-serve reporting
Focus on scenario planning and decision support
This is why teams start looking for a platform.
When do teams know they have hit the limit?
Most teams recognize this moment when:
The board deck takes days to rebuild every month
Adding a new entity or product requires rebuilding the model
Consolidation is a manual exercise
They are afraid to touch the spreadsheet before a meeting
They spend more time maintaining the model than using it
That is the signal.
Watch the full breakdown
In this first video of the series, Christian walks through these concepts inside Abacum and shows exactly what this looks like in practice.
Watch the video above to see:
Metric-based modeling
Multi-entity consolidation
Dependency tracing
