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Leading product analytics company, Mixpanel, uses Abacum to drive company-wide reporting. Now every budget owner has the insights they need to understand their operational and financial performance - helping them increase accountability and strategic decision-making on headcount, costs, and growth. Company: Mixpanel is a leading product analytics company designed to unlock valuable customer insights. As a powerful self-serve tool, Mixpanel helps organizations learn from their data to drive decisions into how to best acquire, convert, and retain users. Today, Mixpanel serves more than 7,000 customers and has helped answer over 81 million critical questions for companies.
The challenge
After raising a $200M Series C investment, Mixpanel was ready to continue investing in its core product, grow through partnerships, and increase market share. These goals required establishing a new layer of foundations to track financial performance, ensure rigor in budget management across departments, and provide the leadership team with the performance indicators needed to drive decisions across the organization. That’s where Abacum came in.
“Everything we do is based on data.” said Phil Perry, VP of Finance at Mixpanel. “Internally, everybody knows how to use Mixpanel to drive product decisions, and Abacum has been able to provide the same level of data-driven decision making for our global financial operations.”
Mixpanel’s ultimate business goal is to provide the most in-depth product analytics that everyone in an organization can use and trust.
By gaining a deeper understanding of its financial performance, Mixpanel will be able to drive better decisions, investments, and strategic outcomes that support growth. Specifically, Mixpanel wanted to empower budget owners with agency over their data through custom reporting templates that ensure performance accountability, and support data driven decisions among senior management.
With Abacum’s reporting workflows, Mixpanel is able to automate the creation of monthly Budget vs Actuals (BvA) reports across its 15 departments with a direct Netsuite integration in just a single click, making it seamless for the FP&A team to ensure performance accountability and surface insights across the company.
The solution
Automation through direct integrations
Through Abacum’s direct Netsuite integration, the Mixpanel FP&A team is able to automate month-end management reporting with just a click of a button. Before Abacum, Mixpanel’s team had built an internal data process requiring SQL transformations hosted in BigQuery.
This process created a layer of abstraction, technical dependencies, and complexity in managing the changes that come with growth, such as new cost centers, departments, and account numbers. “By leveraging Abacum, we were able to remove the dependency on our SQL based process, replacing it with a live sync with Netsuite. Now, mapping new accounts is intuitive and we have the ability to perform inter-departmental allocations,” says Braylan.
Reporting templates
Using Abacum’s reporting templates, Mixpanel has been able to create custom reports for each of their 15 departments, allowing them to achieve company-wide reporting automation.
Every month-end, the FP&A team is able to update the latest actuals and reforecast any necessary expenses. The result is that every team at Mixpanel has its own management reporting space where they can quickly pull insights, drill down into the data, provide context, and support decision-making.
The Impact
Empowered Finance team
Abacum has empowered the finance team at Mixpanel with the process they need to support accelerated growth. By syncing Netsuite data into Abacum, they can now uncover key insights and replace the technical dependency of their SQL based process for an intuitive strategic finance experience. This saves the finance team valuable time throughout the month and provides budget owners with answers on a timely basis.
Providing intuitive performance metrics
After a successful Abacum kickoff, the feedback Phil Perry received from the rest of the Mixpanel organization was “since we started using Abacum, we have been able to provide a more granular BvA, full year views, expense reporting across our different geographies, and cash position BvA”. Ultimately, enabling 15+ budget owners with the intuitive performance metrics they need to make decisions and drive cross-organizational alignment. Phil will continue to focus on scaling Mixpanel knowing Abacum is there to help support their finance function every step of the way.
“Abacum has helped our budget owners understand their budget and performance at the vendor level, while Braylan and the rest of the FP&A team can report and collaborate on key variances with each budget owner.”
Leadership decisions fueling high growth
Mixpanel’s leadership team conducts their own monthly business review using Abacum. Having a custom Executive Summary report with the aggregated analysis on key variances and company wide-performance, Phil and Braylan can provide Mixpanel’s CEO and the rest of the leadership team with all the key operational and financial insights required to drive strategy and support critical decisions on a monthly cadence.
All in all, with Abacum, Mixpanel is able to level up their entire budget vs. actuals reporting process, saving their entire team valuable time for more strategic analysis, company wide alignment and the planning foundations required to continue scaling.
