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 facilities within FP&A software. As organizations generate more data than ever before, finance teams are expected to provide real-time insights, accurate forecasts, and deeper analysis.

What is Automation in FP&A?

Automation in Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) uses technology to replace manual tasks like data entry and report generation, enabling finance teams to focus on strategic analysis and planning.

Automated data processing cuts manual errors by 50%, significantly enhancing report reliability. (source)

By automating repetitive processes, FP&A professionals can deliver more value to their organizations and spend more time on forward-looking activities.

The Challenges Facing FP&A Today

FP&A teams face significant challenges due to time-consuming manual processes.

Despite the growing strategic importance of FP&A, many teams continue to struggle with time constraints caused by manual workflows.

Traditional methods of collecting, processing, and analyzing data create bottlenecks, hindering the ability of finance professionals to respond quickly to business needs.

Agentic AI is projected to manage 15% of day-to-day financial decisions autonomously by 2028, with early adopters reporting doubled operational efficiency. (source)

How the power of automation overcomes those challenges

Automation directly addresses the most pressing challenges in FP&A by streamlining workflows and reducing manual effort.

“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, automating large parts of their reporting models is key to achieving accurate financial forecasts and ensuring strategic alignment across the organization.

Key benefits of automation in FP&A include:

• Reducing time spent on administrative tasks

• Improving the accuracy and reliability of financial data

• Enabling finance teams to focus on analysis, planning, and decision-making

What are Common Manual Tasks in Finance that can be Automated?

Several core FP&A workflows can be automated to save time and reduce errors. By targeting repetitive and manual tasks, finance teams can unlock more time for strategic analysis and become true business partners.

Data collection and consolidation

FP&A teams often spend countless hours manually pulling data from different source systems. Automation tools can connect directly to your ERP, CRM, and HRIS, eliminating manual entry and reducing errors.

This creates a single source of truth for all financial data, ensuring consistency and accuracy across reports.

Financial reporting and dashboarding

Generating monthly or quarterly reports is often a tedious, manual process. Automated financial reporting populates templates with real-time data instantly, allowing you to create dynamic dashboards for stakeholders.

With automation, finance professionals can provide live insights instead of static, outdated reports.

Budgeting and forecasting

The budgeting and forecasting cycle involves collecting input from various department heads. Workflow automation streamlines this process by sending notifications and tracking budget submissions.

This ensures everyone provides their data on time, making the process more efficient and collaborative.

Scenario planning and analysis

Modeling different business outcomes can be complex and time-consuming in spreadsheets. FP&A automation tools allow you to run what-if and scenario analyses with just a few clicks.

This helps you quickly assess the potential impact of different decisions and prepare for various futures.

A Simple Framework for Implementing FP&A Automation

Adopting automation is a strategic journey, not an overnight change. Following a structured approach ensures a smooth transition and maximizes your return on investment. Use this practical framework to guide your team:

1. Evaluate your current processes.
   Map out your existing FP&A workflows and identify the most time-consuming and error-prone manual tasks. This analysis will reveal the best candidates for automation and highlight where the biggest bottlenecks are.

2. Prioritize quick wins for immediate impact.
   Start with small, high-impact automation projects. Automating a single, painful reporting task can deliver a quick win and demonstrate the value of automation, building momentum for larger initiatives.

3. Get stakeholder buy-in.
   Effective change requires support from leadership and other departments. Present a clear business case highlighting time savings, improved accuracy, and strategic benefits. Use the results from your quick wins as proof of concept to gain stakeholder buy-in.

4. Choose the right automation tools.
   Vet software vendors based on your specific needs. Look for an FP&A platform that is flexible, user-friendly, and integrates with your existing tech stack. The right tool should empower your team, not create more complexity.

Automation Trends Shaping FP&A in 2025

1) Increasing self serve access to data

Manual extraction and collection of data is a significant time-waster for FP&A teams. Many organizations still rely on spreadsheets and outdated systems that require hours of data entry.

As we approach 2025, self-serve data technology is becoming low cost and easy to implement. Finance teams can now centralize data management for FP&A, collecting and integrating data from multiple sources (CRM, ERP, Snowflake, etc.) and 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.

 Deliveroo, one of the UK’s fastest growing businesses, processed over 400 million orders in 2023. Within an ERP, each transaction contains valuable identification data, and for the average B2C company, tens of thousands of transactions are handled monthly. This volume makes manual classification unscalable for FP&A analysis.

Without clear classification, it is difficult to confidently base any analysis on this data, which hinders strategic decision-making.

In 2025, AI-powered tools will automatically classify and organize financial data, creating clean, structured datasets ready for analysis. These large language models (LLMs) will learn to better categorize large datasets and build confidence in assigning various tags.

By recording your metrics today on time spent categorizing data and error rates, you can benchmark improvements and AB test AI-driven tools against your sample dataset.

This will streamline the reporting process and ensure that FP&A teams always have access to up-to-date, accurate data for decision making.

AI-powered FP&A will contribute $6.6 trillion to global productivity by 2030, surpassing China's current GDP output.

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 traditional static reporting methods will be phased out. 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.

Real-world examples where real-time data impacts the bottom line:

• Dynamic pricing: Airlines, ticketed events, and retail use real-time consumption data to change pricing dynamically and capture new opportunities.

• Black swan events: Financial meltdowns, war, economic uncertainty, and policy changes require access to performance data to react quickly and mitigate impact.

• Improved customer service: Netflix uses real-time consumption data to personalize content recommendations and keep subscribers engaged. Spotify also leverages real-time data for user engagement.

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. In 2025, companies that 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 LLMs and AI across all industries, the 4th generation of FP&A has begun. Finance teams that introduce AI into their planning operations will have an advantage over those who don’t.

 Take your prior fiscal year revenue figures and test them with several AI forecasting tools to evaluate which are most accurate for your current forecasts, especially those that account for variables like seasonality and 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

Failing to adopt automation in FP&A leads to significant opportunity costs.

As automation becomes more advanced and accessible, the opportunity cost of not investing in scalable FP&A software becomes increasingly apparent. Businesses that fail to adopt automation will be left behind, continuing to spend valuable time on manual tasks that could be automated.

For example: Saving just two hours per week for every key stakeholder in the organization—from the CEO to department heads—can quickly add up. These time savings free leadership to focus on driving growth and making strategic decisions, increasing the probability of successfully reaching the next stage in your company journey.

Future Outlook for FP&A Automation

By 2025, automation will be essential for FP&A teams.

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 don’t risk falling behind.