Introduction
Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) is undergoing a significant transformation. Once primarily focused on historical reporting, FP&A teams are now being called upon to drive strategic decision-making, guiding businesses toward future growth.
This shift is largely being driven by technological advancements, particularly automation. As organizations generate more data than ever before, finance teams are expected to provide real-time insights, accurate forecasts, and deeper analysis.
Automation enables FP&A professionals to stop spending time on manual reporting and data entry, empowering them to focus on delivering strategic value and planning for the future.
The Challenges Facing FP&A Today
Despite the growing strategic importance of FP&A, many teams continue to struggle with time constraints caused by manual processes.
Traditional methods of collecting, processing, and analyzing data create bottlenecks, hindering the ability of finance professionals to respond quickly to business needs.
Research shows that FP&A teams currently spend as much as 40% of their week on manual data entry tasks. This inefficiency not only restricts their ability to focus on high-value activities but can also lead to errors in forecasting and reporting. The result? Organizations risk making decisions based on outdated or inaccurate data.
The Power of Automation
Automation has the potential to radically transform the FP&A function.
“In a Gartner survey of 273 FP&A managers and finance business partners and 102 senior decision makers at organizations with more than $250 million in revenue, conducted from September through October 2023, only 15% of FP&A leaders reported having a sustainable delivery model where their teams can maintain a consistent level of decision and planning support across decision makers while supporting complex, new decisions without burning out FP&A staff.”
Source: Gartner
For 85% of these respondents, the automation of large parts of their reporting models is the key to achieve accurate financial forecasts and ensure strategic alignment across the organization.
This statistic underscores the critical role that automation can play in improving the accuracy and efficiency of financial planning. By automating time-consuming tasks, finance teams can spend less time on administrative duties and more time on analysis, planning, and decision-making.
Automation Trends Shaping FP&A in 2025
1- Increasing self serve access to data One of the most significant time-wasters for FP&A teams today is the manual extraction and collection of data. In many organizations, finance professionals still rely on spreadsheets and outdated systems that require hours of data entry.
As we approach 2025, this will change. Previously, it was only for enterprises, or really data savvy companies who built self service tools to automatically extract data.
Today this technology is low cost and easy to implement so finance teams can centralise data management for FP&A and collect and integrate data from multiple sources (CRM, ERP, Snowflake etc), eliminating the need for manual entry.
FP&A professionals will spend far less time gathering data and far more time interpreting it, making real-time insights a reality.
Key Impact: Automation in data collection will drastically reduce manual workload, increase accuracy, and provide FP&A teams with real-time data for faster decision-making.
2- AI-Powered Classification For B2C organizations with high transaction volumes, manually categorizing and organizing data is a major pain point.
Take Deliveroo for example, one of the UK’s fastest growing businesses, who in 2023 did over 400 million order annually.
Within an ERP, each transaction contains valuable identification data and for the average B2C company you will be handling tens of thousands of these transactions monthly. Which for any FP&A analysis is an unscalable amount of data to classify and tag these cash transactions.
The challenge is without clear classification, it is difficult to confidently base any analysis on this data and this is a hinderance for strategic decision making.
In 2025, AI-powered tools will be able to automatically classify and organize financial data, creating clean, structured datasets ready for analysis. These LLM’s will be able to learn how to better categorise large datasets and build confidence into assigning various tags.
By recording your metrics today on time spent categorising data plus the error percentage of pulled data, you can benchmark where improvements can be made and AB test AI-driven tools against this sample dataset.
This will streamline the reporting process and ensure that FP&A teams always have access to up-to-date, accurate data to base decision making on.
Key Impact: AI-driven classification will reduce errors and improve data accuracy, feeding into better financial reporting and analysis.
3 – Connected Data for Stakeholders According to Gartner, only 29% of organizations can evaluate data fast enough to take advantage of it.
In the future, real-time data will become the norm, and as a result, the traditional static reporting methods will be phased out. Instead, dynamic dashboards will provide stakeholders across departments with the information they need at any moment.
This shift will reduce the time spent on reporting meetings and allow teams to focus more on finding solutions and making decisions. Automation will connect various data sources, ensuring stakeholders always have access to the most current insights.
If we think about real world examples where real time data impacts the bottom line:
Dynamic pricing This happens with ticketed events, with airlines, with retail and beyond. It is the single best example of how real time consumption data allows these retailers to change pricing dynamically to reflect real world opportunities.
Black swan events Financial meltdowns, war, economic uncertainty, government policy changes – things happen outside of our control and having access to performance data allows us to react quickly to mitigate the impact.
Improved customer service The best example in recent times is Netflix, who use real time consumption data on every subscriber to understand how they engage with content and push personalised selections to these subscribers to keep them coming back for more.
Honourable mentions to Spotify too.
Key Impact: Automation will enable better collaboration and faster decision-making across the organization, enhancing cross-functional communication and alignment to gain competitive advantages.
4 – Real-Time Investor Reporting Investor expectations are evolving, and in 2025, companies who are willing and able to deliver performance dashboards to the board with clean, real-time data will gain a competitive advantage over those who report monthly.
Instead of relying on static reports that quickly become outdated, businesses will provide investors with automated dashboards that show up-to-the-minute performance data. This shift will improve transparency and allow companies to maintain stronger relationships with their investors.
Key Impact: Real-time investor reporting will save time, improve transparency, and foster greater investor confidence.
5 – AI-Driven Forecasting Forecasting has always been a core responsibility of FP&A teams, but it can be labor-intensive and prone to errors.
With the rise of LLM’s and AI across all industries, the rise of the 4th generation of FP&A has begun and finance teams who can introduce AI into their planning operation will have an advantage over those who don’t.
Take your prior FY revenue figures and test them out with several AI forecasting tools to evaluate which are most accurate to your current forecasts, particularly those which account for variables like seasonality & industry specific trends.
AI models will continuously improve their accuracy over time, creating more precise forecasts that allow businesses to better plan for the future.
Key Impact: AI-powered forecasting will increase the accuracy of financial projections, leading to better resource allocation and strategic planning.
6 – AI-Powered Scenario Planning As AI continues to develop, its role in scenario planning will become more prominent. FP&A teams will be able to simulate multiple future scenarios—whether based on specific goals or current actuals—and run sophisticated analyses such as Monte Carlo simulations.
This capability will allow finance teams to assess various strategic options and choose the best path forward.
Key Impact: AI-powered scenario planning will give businesses the tools to prepare for multiple outcomes, improving their ability to adapt to changing market conditions.
The Opportunity Cost of Inaction
As automation becomes more advanced and accessible, the opportunity cost of not investing in scalable FP&A software will become increasingly apparent.
Businesses that fail to adopt automation will be left behind, as they continue to spend valuable time on manual tasks that could be automated.
For instance, consider the impact of saving just two hours per week for every key stakeholder in the organization—from the CEO to department heads. These time savings can quickly add up, freeing leadership to focus on driving growth and making strategic decisions which increase the probability of successfully reaching the next stage in your company journey.
Conclusion
By 2025, automation will no longer be a luxury for FP&A teams—it will be a necessity.
The benefits of automation are clear: improved accuracy, greater efficiency, and the ability to focus on strategic tasks that drive business growth. As finance teams prepare for the future, investing in scalable, AI-powered automation tools will be critical to staying competitive in an increasingly fast-paced business environment.
The time to act is now—those who embrace automation will be well-positioned to succeed, while those who do not risk falling behind.
