How I Solved It: How Kajabi Scaled Modern Financial Planning with Abacum + Rippling

Background & Role Context

Riley Greene is a finance associate at Kajabi, an all-in-one platform designed for creators and entrepreneurs to build and sell online courses, membership sites, and other digital products.

Kajabi is a leading technology company with over 400 employees, empowering creators and entrepreneurs to build, market, and sell digital products. As Kajabi scaled, our finance team—responsible for planning, budgeting, and reporting—needed a solution that could keep up with our growth and data complexity.

Here’s how we leveraged Abacum and Rippling’s powerful integration to streamline financial planning.

The Problem: Manual, disjointed data management

Before Abacum, our financial planning lived in Google Sheets. While flexible, Sheets simply couldn’t handle the volume and complexity of Kajabi’s data. Every update to our headcount model meant manually exporting CSVs from Rippling, cleaning and formatting them, and then pasting them into our models. This process was slow, error-prone, and took valuable time away from strategic work.

The Solution: Implementing Abacum + Rippling

We chose Abacum because it’s not just a planning tool—it’s an extremely modern, cloud-native solution purpose-built for today’s finance and business planning needs. Abacum’s robust integrations, including direct API connections to NetSuite, Snowflake, and Rippling, meant we could finally unify all our critical data sources in one place.

It was a little bit tricky, but end-to-end, we were able to get value in a couple of weeks.

Setting up the integration required collaboration between our team, Rippling, and Abacum. The most time-consuming part was ensuring our data was clean and ready for automation, but the payoff was immediate.

How Abacum and Rippling Integrate: 5-Step Process

Step 1: Connect Abacum to Rippling via the Integration Center

Start by navigating to Rippling’s App Shop or Integration Center and selecting Abacum from the list of available integrations. Initiate the connection and assign access to key finance and HR team members using Rippling’s role-based permissions to ensure secure, appropriate data sharing.

Step 2: Sync Workforce Data Automatically

Once connected, Rippling’s real-time employee data—such as headcount, salaries, departments, and role information—automatically syncs into Abacum’s FP&A platform. You can confirm that the correct user and workforce data are flowing by reviewing the synced employee records in Abacum.

Step 3: Build and Update Financial Models in Abacum

With the workforce data now available in Abacum, finance teams can immediately incorporate up-to-date headcount, compensation, and departmental costs into their financial models. This enables automated headcount forecasting, granular expense analysis, and scenario planning based on live data from Rippling.

Step 4: AI-Powered Reconciliation of New Hires

Abacum’s AI automatically reconciles new hires synced from Rippling with the forecasted hires in Abacum. This means that as soon as a new employee is added in Rippling, Abacum matches the actual hire against planned positions, highlights any variances, and updates headcount models accordingly. This automation eliminates manual tracking, ensuring your forecasts and reports always reflect the latest hiring reality.

Step 5: Monitor and Maintain Data Integrity

Abacum provides a clear audit trail and dashboards to track all synced data and model updates. Regular, automated data refreshes from Rippling eliminate manual reconciliation and reduce errors, while both platforms’ user management features ensure only authorized stakeholders can access sensitive information.

The Impact: Modern, Unified Planning at Scale

With Abacum and Rippling working together, we’ve transformed how Kajabi plans and operates. Regular headcount updates that used to take hours now refresh automatically. We’ve eliminated manual uploads, reduced errors, and gained instant access to workforce insights.

Abacum’s modern platform means we can now reconcile hiring pipelines, actuals, and variances in a single, unified view—enabling true alignment between recruiting and finance. We’re not just faster—we’re smarter.

Personal Reflections: A New Standard for Finance Teams

Abacum and Rippling has enabled Kajabi’s finance team to move from operational execution to true strategic partnership. We’re no longer stuck in spreadsheets—we’re leveraging a modern planning platform that matches the scale and ambition of our company. Before harnessing the power of Abacum and Rippling, we were a reactive team. This tool has helped us shift towards being proactive—focusing on what the numbers mean, rather than just trying to get the numbers right. 

Would Kajabi recommend Abacum and Rippling? Absolutely.

In summary:

Abacum is the modern planning solution Kajabi needed to unify our finance and people data, automate manual work, and empower our teams to make faster, smarter decisions. Together with Rippling, we’ve set a new standard for what’s possible in business planning at scale.