Challenge

What problems did RapidSOS face?

When Richard Harem, Senior Finance Director, joined RapidSOS in May 2023, the business was scaling rapidly.

He had the immediate challenge of rebuilding the FP&A function from the ground up with the vision of creating a finance team of the future.

Manual reporting issues: With the business growing fast, their current manual spreadsheet operation was outdated and unscalable with reports taking 90 mins each to complete.

Unable to drive strategic decisions: Due to time constraints, RapidSOS’s finance team wasn’t able to deliver the kind of strategic insights to really impact the business.

Lack of centralized data: With their data siloed and lacking structure, RapidSOS needed to establish a real-time single source of truth quickly.

Solution

RapidSOS chose Abacum for our scalability

RapidSOS were looking for an FP&A solution that could help them deliver on their ambitious plans to drive stakeholder autonomy. They were looking to invest in a partnership for the long term, and needed a scalable solution that they wouldn’t have to revisit in 2 years.

After reviewing several vendors, RapidSOS decided that Abacum had the best functionality fit, enabling them to automate reporting and drive planning-related insights.

They could see Abacum’s potential to quickly transform their reporting operation and deliver the technical depth and modeling flexibility to support strategic planning as they scaled. The fast and low-cost implementation process was also very appealing.

If we’re building the finance team of the future, we need to automate everything in the FP&A process and put data at the fingertips of our stakeholders, so they can autonomously make strategic decisions.

Richard Harem, Senior Finance Director at RapidSOS

Result

Creating autonomy for budgeting

The team completely revamped the way budgets were managed across the business, establishing guardrails but giving budget holders autonomy over budget allocation.

Each budget holder has their own dashboard within Abacum to streamline BvA. They can also drill down into the underlying numbers to better understand variances and use data to inform decisions. 

Use Case Example: Events are now broken down into size as well as geographical location, and budgeted for based on historical data. This allows the marketing team to allocate resources more strategically and identify events with the highest ROI to drive opportunity creation and pipeline. 

Impact of our team

Scaling together: how our customer-centric team empowered RapidSOS

“Abacum’s team were really good at recreating our existing setup inside Abacum and they were really transparent about what was possible today and what they’d be able to deliver after a defined period of time.

What I learned about Abacum is that you’re growing and scaling as a business just like us; you have a powerful product, you have a vision and your focus is on solving the problem for finance.”