Daily Reporting Beats Annual Planning
Taimur Abdaal, CEO and co-founder of Causal, on the future of the "better spreadsheet"
The real prize is daily reporting, not annual planning, because reporting creates a much wider and more frequent reason to adopt a numbers tool. Every company needs a live view of ARR, burn, runway, pipeline, and other operating metrics all year, while many smaller companies rebuild budgets or models only once or twice a year. That makes BI and reporting the natural entry point, with planning as a later expansion path.
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Causal had already started seeing customers replace Metabase and use it as the source of truth for both forecasts and operating data. That matters because it turns a tool bought for occasional finance work into something teams open continuously to check actuals, track metrics, and share dashboards.
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Equals describes the same demand pattern from a different angle. Teams prototype dashboards in spreadsheets, harden them in BI tools, then pull data back into Excel when a metric looks wrong. That loop makes reporting a larger workflow than planning, because it sits in the day to day operating cadence of finance, ops, sales, and founders.
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The market structure also points this way. Vena grew to $116M ARR by staying anchored in FP&A and expanding into adjacent planning use cases, while newer tools like Causal, Equals, and Runway are all pushing toward a blend of connectors, spreadsheet logic, and dashboards. The category is widening from finance software into general company reporting software.
The next phase is a land and expand motion that starts with reporting, then absorbs planning once the data, dashboards, and trust are already in place. The winners will be the products that can show live business metrics for the whole company, then let the same teams move seamlessly from explaining what happened to modeling what happens next.