A financial reporting system that reduced prep time by 50% and achieved 40% customer adoption.
Through user interviews, journey mapping, and iterative prototyping, I designed a system that enabled finance teams to create reports in one click, with automatic data updates and collaborative features.
This helped customers gain complete visibility over budget owners' progress while eliminating manual tasks, and becoming a key differentiator for the product.
Outcomes
50%
reduction in time spent on the report preparation
40%
feature adoption within first 30 days
50%
increased platform activity after feature release
The reporting feature became one of the features that sets Abacum apart from its main competitors and also where the company found its product market fit.
Customer validation
“Collaborating with budget owners on our monthly reports in Abacum has been game-changing.”
— Nerea, Finance Controller @ Voicemod
“Very easy to build reports, and have my data ready. We’ve made faster and smarter decisions on a company-wide level.”
— Xavier, CFO @ Typeform
“Abacum automated our manual tasks, accelerated the reporting process, and gave us more time to produce better analysis.”
— Maria, VP Finance @ IronHack
The Solution
The feature enabled users to create their monthly performance reports recurrently in a quick and easy way, with multiple key capabilities that support this functionality:
One-click report creation — eliminating manual processes
Automatic data updates — any data in tables or charts updates to the report's specific time frame
Status tracking — reports can be associated with specific statuses for complete team visibility
Automated notifications — budget owners are notified based on report status changes
Granular permissions — permissions tied to report status, providing more granularity and covering more use cases
The three core principles that guided this solution were:
✓ Automation — eliminating manual tasks and enabling one-click operations
✓ Alignment — putting everyone on the same page with a single source of truth
✓ Visibility — providing finance controllers with complete overview of budget owners' progress
Impact
Following the release of the entire set of features, the reports functionality was quickly adopted and the number of active users increased from 17 to 24 within the first 30 days, representing a 40% growth. These values remained consistent over time (1st graphic).
Furthermore, we observed increased activity within the entire platform after this release (2nd graphic).
Design Process
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Design Process ↓
7 min. read
7 min. read
Research
Together with research, we started by mapping out the user journey of our customers. We also conducted interviews with them and with other finance experts.
Key insight
The biggest pain wasn't creating reports—it was getting budget owners to review and approve them on time. This led us to focus on collaboration features, not just automation.
Journey mapping
Monthly reporting journey map showing key friction points that led to our focus on collaborative workflows, status tracking, and automated notifications rather than just faster report generation.
Pain point analysis
User interviews uncovered that finance teams' biggest frustrations centered around visibility and coordination, not speed—insights that directly shaped our focus on collaborative workflows and status tracking.
Translating insights into opportunities
The research showed collaboration was the real problem, therefore we created How might we’s to align the team around coordination and accountability.
How might we … ?
… enable better collaboration between finance teams and budget owners?
… automatically notify budget owners and track their review progress?
… provide complete visibility over the reporting progress and accountability?
… create permissions that support collaborative workflows?
Ideation
The previous questions allowed us to kick-off the sketch phase, where we explored a few ideas that we believe could have a bigger impact.
Key ideas explored in these sketches:
Binding the reports to specific periods of time;
Provide feedback on the report progress;
Permissions and access based on the workspace's status.
Sacrificial concepts
I synthesized the best ideas into 3 different concepts and validated them with engineering and customers.
Since each concept was substantially different, this proved an efficient way to determine our direction. We scored them on reach, impact, confidence, and effort.
Implementation & Roll out
A range of features were identified, that addressed both automation and collaboration—making report creation effortless while improving coordination across teams.
Due to development capacity constraints, we rolled out the initiative in two phases:
The 1st iteration focused on allowing users to set up the report structure and get accustomed to its logic.
The 2nd iteration introduced collaboration features—status tracking, automated notifications, and granular permissions—enabling finance teams to coordinate effectively with budget owners and maintain visibility throughout the reporting process.
Learnings
We learned that collaboration features significantly deepened user engagement with the platform—when users could work together more effectively, they relied on Abacum more consistently.
This was one of our most challenging initiatives, requiring us to navigate a complex use case with multiple interconnected problems. Success depended on close squad collaboration and constant alignment between design, engineering, and stakeholders to balance ambitious goals with technical feasibility.