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Solving Financial Reporting Challenges

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This is a blog post from our partner Workday, highlighting common financial reporting challenges and explaining how to solve them.

Stakeholders want self-service: Reporting runs the gamut, from presenting department managers with data on how their actuals compare to budget, to showing board members how expansions or changes in the product mix are impacting margins.

Why it matters: Businesses largely run on accurate, timely financial reports, as they are home to critical financial and operational key performance indicators.

Most organizations know that their financial reporting is not as good as it should be. The reasons are many—chief among them is the perception that process improvements are too difficult and take too much time to implement.

But when you put better reporting on the back burner, you put your business at risk. Instead of looking in the rear-view mirror—a static approach to planning that reports on what happened in the past—it’s far more effective for finance teams to look out the windshield and anticipate what’s ahead. 

Let’s take a look at four common financial reporting challenges and how to tackle them:

Challenge 1: Verifying Accuracy

Excel is a great tool. But the static nature of spreadsheets makes it difficult to quickly and consistently produce up-to-date financial reports, which compromises speed and accuracy. Spreadsheets can also create version-control issues when they’re routed for review or verification, hindering efficiency and security.

Even with single-user spreadsheets, lack of a centralized reporting system introduces more inconsistencies in metrics, data, and calculations, forcing finance teams to spend valuable time verifying and validating data. In this situation, it’s especially difficult to conduct variance and comparative reporting—a step that can reveal necessary course corrections. CFOs who automate data gathering can instill a greater level of trust in the data while making it easier to reveal valuable insights.

Excel is a great tool. But the static nature of spreadsheets makes it difficult to quickly and consistently produce up-to-date financial reports, which compromises speed and accuracy.

Challenge 2: Wrestling Data from Multiple Systems

As a finance professional, you’re responsible for generating clear and actionable financial data. Your company’s decision-makers must be able to understand not only the analysis behind the data, but also the actions to consider as a result of that analysis.

But one missing piece of data can prevent stakeholders from getting the insights they need. And with more organizations tracking nonfinancial metrics, corporate reports are including increasing amounts of operational data. Using traditional reporting methods to access and incorporate such information—usually housed outside of finance—creates an additional burden.

Challenge 3: Lack of Collaboration

Financial reporting should be a collaborative process, with finance and nonfinance managers working together to not only report the numbers, but to also use them to drive insights and take action. But all too often, operating managers don’t have sufficient input or buy-in to the financial planning process, and they aren’t educated about how their decisions can influence overall profitability. For its part, finance isn’t able to offer real performance insights that might truly help managers improve their results because legacy reporting tools don’t enable stakeholder collaboration.

Challenge 4: Data Interpretation

You’ve gathered the data—now you need to analyze and interpret it so you can clearly articulate financial and operational insights. The more the organization understands the story behind the numbers, the greater the chance it has to be data-driven—and the more effective you can be in getting your message across to key stakeholders.

That’s because those outside of finance tend to consume data visually. They seek more than just numbers; they want to understand the impact and implications of the data you present. For those wanting to make good on good intentions, intuitive dashboards and data visualization are a great way to build a story that clearly shows current performance, future trends, and possible scenarios. Ideally, you should choose a dashboard offering that gives finance staff the flexibility to quickly and easily deliver data in a range of formats desired by stakeholders.

What’s the Answer?

To overcome these traditional reporting challenges, you need to go beyond yesterday’s inadequate access to information and limited financial reporting. You need a system that is more sophisticated than a spreadsheet, but not so overly engineered that it takes six months to deploy and requires significant IT involvement.

The solution you choose should deliver financial intelligence that drives improved business performance and accelerates growth. And it should enable an active planning approach to finance—a process that allows finance to shift into a leadership and guiding role, instead of having to focus on static, transactional back-office tasks.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Promise of AI in Finance

The Role of Generative AI in Forecasting

The Future of FP&A: Intelligent Forecasting

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The Role of Generative AI in Forecasting

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This is a blog post from our partner, Workday, highlighting findings on Generative AI from a Deloitte CFO Signals quarterly survey.

In the world of finance, Generative AI has entered the chat.

In a recent CFO Signals, Deloitte focused part of its survey on Gen AI and found that “a sizeable proportion of CFOs’ organizations (42%) are experimenting with it, while 15% are incorporating it into their business strategy.”

Nearly one-quarter (24%) of respondents said they’re “reading and talking about it,” while another 17% opined “it’s too soon to tell.”

Generative AI—the technology that can take vast amounts of data and use it to create new content—has captured the attention of a wide variety of industries. 

And it’s no surprise, considering the potential impact of the technology. Last year, McKinsey & Company estimated the global economic benefits of Generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 to $4.4 trillion a year across 63 use cases it analyzed. As a point of comparison, the report noted that the United Kingdom’s 2021 GDP was $3.1 trillion. 

A Cautious Approach Toward Gen AI

Reflecting a cautious, analytical approach as a whole, the survey’s 115 respondents expressed a few common concerns around Gen AI and the potential benefits of AI in finance.

Finance leaders’ top three concerns were around the technology: “impact to risk and internal controls” (57%), “data infrastructure and technology needs” (52%), and “investment needs (technology and capabilities)” at 51%.

The findings reflect the need for responsible AI on a wide scale to establish trust, minimize risk, and drive greater business performance.

What AI Can Do for the Finance Function

While a significant proportion of CFOs are considering the risks of an increasingly technology-enhanced future, the potential benefits of Generative AI are also dawning on them.

Almost half of finance leaders (49%) named planning, forecasting, and analysis as the top potential uses of Generative AI, far outpacing the automation of routine or transactional processes (26%) and increased efficiency (20%).

Meanwhile, CFOs identified the top three benefits they hope to achieve if their organization were to adopt Gen AI:

  • Reduce costs (52%)
  • Improve customer/client experience (50%)
  • Increase margins, efficiencies, and/or productivity (45%)

Other potential benefits include developing new capabilities, products, or services; creating scale and/or capacity; and improving the accuracy of forecasting, modeling, and scenario planning.

What’s Needed to Incorporate Gen AI in Finance

Lending weight to the idea that intelligent finance demands a human-centered approach to AI, a majority of CFOs (63%) said talent resources and capabilities present the biggest barrier to adopting and deploying Gen AI within their organizations.

Finance leaders further said that the single most important factor in helping them make decisions related to using Gen AI are use cases (39%). CFOs also mentioned wanting to understand the ROI of gen AI, as well understanding of risks and limitations along with best practices from peers within their industry.

While widespread adoption of AI in finance hasn’t yet happened, it’s clear that it’s on the radar of many CFOs in the forefront.

“Do they have the necessary data, technology, and talent to implement GenAI?” Deloitte wrote in its report. “The survey results suggest no―not yet anyway. But for now, CFOs appear to be curious about the upsides and downsides of GenAI, and what opportunities, as well as challenges, the technology might bring.” 

Read the full CFO Signals 3Q 2023 report at Deloitte.


This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

CFOs on AI, Partnerships and Skills

Workday’s Global CFO AI Indicator Report

The Mandate for Business Agility

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Tracking KPIs for SaaS Companies

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High-growth SaaS companies have to be rigorous in their planning. They need to allocate resources strategically. They need to be able to quickly run different scenarios in order to understand the impact of changes to their business. 

For example, you are the CFO of a SaaS business. You’d like to update headcount and ARR under contract models to reflect Q1 actuals. You need to incorporate revised pipeline forecasts from sales. What does this mean for your Q4 cash position? In the world of SaaS, this one “small” change triggers a waterfall of updates consuming hours, days or even weeks. That is time you simply do not have. 

As with many businesses, SaaS companies rely on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand how the business is performing. But what KPIs should you be tracking?

10 KPIs for SaaS businesses

Here are 10 KPIs you should track:

  1. 1. Customer Churn Rate – The percentage of customers lost in a given time
  2. 2. New Buyer Growth Rate – The speed at which you gain new customers over defined periods of time
  3. 3. Lifetime Value – The revenue from a customer over the retention time period
  4. 4. Customer Acquisition Costs – The amount of money a company speeds to get a new customer
  5. 5. Net Burn Rate – The Net Cash spent in a specific time frame (usually monthly or normalized to a year)
  6. 6. Runway – The time that a startup has before they run out of finances
  7. 7. Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) – The average revenue generated per customer (either monthly or annually)
  8. 8. SaaS Quick Ratio – This compares revenue added (new business) vs revenue lost (churn)
  9. 9. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) – This is the monthly revenue from customers with a subscription
  10. 10. Total Addressable Market (TAM) – The market size of a product/service in value that the company can achieve

Workday Adaptive Planning is a strategic resource to help you uses up to date data to drive your KPI models. 

How SaaS Companies use Workday Adaptive Planning

  • Subscription waterfalls – forecast new and renewal ACV/ARR, retention and churn by segment
  • Sales rep productivity – plan sales rep capacity, quota coverage and territories
  • Cohort modeling – model subscriber cohorts, retention, lead conversion and contract ramping
  • Professional services – plan bookings, backlog hours, billing rates  and utilization by role
  • 606 revenue and commissions amortization – model complex revenue and commission amortization profiles based on contract duration
  • Workforce planning – plan and reconcile head count plans to manage a growing workforce
  • Vendor-level spend – budget and actualize IT, consulting, marketing and other material expenses at the vendor level

Read more from this series:

Workday Adaptive Planning in Use: A Fireside Chat with Ben Hart, CFO of Texans Credit Union

Workday Adaptive Planning Customers See 249% ROI

Unlocking Success: Harnessing Customer Satisfaction Metrics with Workday Adaptive Planning

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The Future of FP&A: Intelligent Forecasting

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday. It provides insights on how Generative AI will impact FP&A activities.

Digital transformation and data go hand in hand. Most executives get this: today, the vast majority view data as a critical asset to be tapped, and new AI capabilities have made this data more beneficial than ever, says Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

But here’s the catch, Schrage asserts: Most executives can’t name the five most valuable data assets within their organization, or their firm’s return on data (ROD). That’s a problem, he says, because if a business isn’t paying close attention to the strategic value of its data, making the right AI investments will be much harder. And as the age of generative AI and machine learning (ML) takes off, the potential ROI on those investments for CFOs and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams is massive. Achieving those returns requires merging and marrying your most valuable data with AI.

The ways AI can power a paradigm shift in forecasting and metrics are coming into focus, Schrage says. Trained on customized data sets, large language models (LLMs) can turn KPIs into intelligent mechanisms that help create new value, instead of just tracking and protecting value. And with ML supporting FP&A activities, forecasting can become a source of dynamic insights to support operations and workforce planning—far more than just an accurate financial picture of the future. KPIs become tools for better key performance insights and key performance investments.

In other words, “The generative revolution changes everything,” Schrage says.

Future-Ready Metrics

With data now a lifeblood connecting and defining the digitally transformed organization, metrics have become increasingly important for value protection and value creation. Schrage’s most recent research focuses on combining generative AI, ML, and KPIs, asking whether KPIs can evolve beyond being simple measures and instead become software agents capable of learning.

This idea is no longer a hypothetical, given dramatic developments in generative AI over the last few years. Aided by AI, metrics can become forward-looking tools to support forecasting and scenario planning activities, helping finance leaders be more proactive and strategic. 

Using ChatGPT, you can actually ask the KPI questions that matter most, Schrage says. “What could we do to improve you? Is the data helpful to you? What new data would improve your forecast? What would you say under this circumstance? Do you think this scenario would be good for you or bad for you?” 

The bottom line: AI can help the finance function drive value with more predictive and future-oriented KPIs, whether it’s classic metrics such as revenue, profit, and sales, or increasingly important hybrid financial custom-facing metrics such as customer lifetime value or customer churn rate.

“What if your customer lifetime value KPI could talk to your customer churn KPI? The math of that kind of thing is interesting,” Schrage says.

Data + AI = Intelligent Forecasting

The potential value of predictive insights unlocked by AI is huge. So long as LLMs are trained on quality data—bad data is a major stumbling block for organizations in adopting AI, a global Workday survey found—finance leaders have the opportunity to rethink what forecasting can and should be. 

“Is a forecast about being correct and precise, or is it about being a source of insight and conversation for how the business should prepare and prioritize, go to market, or respond to customer needs?” Schrage asks. With custom LLMs or ML in the mix, forecasting becomes a richer, more cost-effective way of gaining actionable insights for the organization.

When it comes to scenario planning, Schrage sees multiple potential forecasting use cases emerging via generative AI apps built atop customized LLMs. Expect to see emerging AI/LLM ecosystems (such as Hugging Face, LangChain, and OpenAI) allow businesses to connect data streams from platforms such as Workday with generative AI systems to populate scenarios with real data and defined parameters, he says. 

“The ability to interconnect, to create interoperability between Workday and specific scenarios—it could become really meaningful, something that could be part of a compliance stress test for one’s FP&A initiatives,” Schrage adds, observing that the costs for these kinds of analytics are coming down.

Starting Points

The scope and purpose of a custom forecasting model or scenario will vary business to business, of course. But all organizations should start their AI and ML planning journey from the same place, Castonguay says. 

“You have to start with your business needs,” he adds. “What problem are you solving for? Figure that out and go from there.”

Data can be another entry point, Schrage adds. “If data is an asset, then what are your most valuable assets—and how can you get greater value from them?”

Answering that question is made harder by data silos, which remain common. Nearly two-thirds (59%) of organizations report their data is somewhat or completely siloed—and just 4% say their data is fully accessible, according to the latest Workday global survey. Those numbers need to change.

To boost accessibility and value extraction in the age of AI, Schrage suggests the finance function needs to step up and take charge of data.

“For the future of capital allocation, CFOs should be first among equals,” Schrage says. “They should be the drivers of change.”

That makes sense considering that finance—once slower to adopt AI than other functions—is gearing up its AI activity. Gartner® predicts that by 2026, 80% of large finance teams will rely on internally managed and owned generative AI platforms that have been trained on their own proprietary business data.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

CFOs on AI, Partnerships and Skills

Workday’s Global CFO AI Indicator Report

The Mandate for Business Agility

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 5

CFOs on AI, Partnerships and Skills

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This a blog post from our partner Workday, sharing thoughts from the CFOs at Kickstarter, McKinsey & Company and Workday. 

It’s never been more important for CFOs to understand and embrace technologies with the potential to transform the finance function—particularly as the impact of AI becomes more apparent every day. 

“If you look at the role of the CFO today, which in many ways is a core component—if not the strategic architect—of an institution, you have to look at the opportunities around technology,” said Eric Kutcher, senior partner and CFO at McKinsey & Company. “If we’re going to drive growth and productivity … technology probably becomes the number one source of that productivity.”

Finance leaders must familiarize themselves with technologies in a way that helps them not only see firsthand the possibilities for enterprise value, but also understand how younger generations have come to experience technology, Kutcher said. That’s particularly important with generative AI, he added. “It’s hard to be leading an organization of the size and scale we all do if we’re not at the forefront.”

Those were just some of the critical observations that came out of a CFO panel in a recent Fortune webinar. Read on to learn what more Kutcher, Kickstarter CFO Sindy Wilson, and Workday CFO Zane Rowe shared on their approaches to people and technology in the era of AI.

The CFO Role in Innovation

CFOs have largely fulfilled a financial controller function within organizations, protecting value by evaluating ROI. While that remains a core function for finance leaders, the future of finance is built on value creation. 

That shift necessitates CFOs to think about significant enterprise expenditures on technology as investments, which requires CFOs to establish greater partnerships with CIOs and CTOs. 

Part of that journey, Kutcher added, involves shifting to a mindset that asks: “How do we evolve our firm or institution to enable us to do the things that are strategically important—much of which has an innovation component to it—and how do we create the economic model to do that?”

That’s how CFOs can go from someone whose purpose appears to be cost containment to being an enabler of innovation.

Finance leaders are positioned to have a broadly informed and valuable perspective, Kutcher said. “You have this unique vantage so you can ask those questions and can invite yourself into some meetings, and as long as you do it in a way that is uplifting and moving forward.”

For his part, Kutcher said he makes telephone calls to his peers on McKinsey’s leadership team on at least a weekly basis. “I’m actually just curious what they’re doing, both personally and professionally.”

AI’s Potential: ‘The Biggest Sea Change’

When it comes to AI in finance, Kutcher said he’s bullish: “With the limited experiments we’ve already done with AI, it has created real opportunities for us to have better insight and be able to synthesize much faster.”

Kutcher added that he only expects the technology’s speed and quality to improve over time, enhancing strategic thinking and allowing for deeper questions.

“We’re just at the beginning, but I think this is the biggest sea change we will see not just in finance but in business at large.”

Why Relationships and Trust Matter

Building trust with technology leaders is important for Sindy Wilson, CFO at Kickstarter.

“Gaining an understanding of our capabilities and challenges has really helped to build trust and have less friction-filled interactions with our technology leaders as we try to solve for innovative solutions we want to develop together,” she said.

Wilson added that one of her goals for herself and her team is learning. “I want them to be a student of the functions that we support,” she said.

Finally, Wilson values transparency about how she makes decisions. “I’m an incrementalist,” she said. “I like to make sure that we test and learn. I want to pilot a kind of proof before making big investments, and the team understanding how I think about how we make investments is important as well.”

People and learning are also an important part of technology strategy for Zane Rowe, CFO at Workday.

“As CFOs you should be encouraged to work closely in partnership with technology—a practice that can help leaders identify shared opportunities, whether it’s around AI or other advances in technology,” he said.

Rowe said he spends plenty of time with colleagues on the business technology side “to think about how we do things better not only in finance but across the organization, to become more efficient and then invest in other parts of the business.”

Technology as ‘Co-Pilot’

As AI plays a larger role in finance, Rowe emphasized the importance of CFOs recognizing the technology’s capabilities.

“It’s incumbent upon you to learn and to understand it’s not necessarily learning in conventional ways,” he said. “To really understand what is the art of the possible doesn’t mean you have to become a coder. Spending enough time and being influenced by people in technology will help you understand what those opportunities are.”

Acknowledging the increase in “consumerization”—or low-code, no-code interfaces—of business technology, Kutcher said he views technology as a “co-pilot” to assist people. “At some level, it is less about understanding that technology, and more about understanding the application of that technology.”

Rowe described how that works in practice: At Workday, the finance organization conducted brainstorming sessions in partnership with the technology group to come up with ideas for real-life use cases where AI and other technologies could increase productivity and efficiency.

“It was an opportunity to have real-time results and have teams go out and try different things,” Rowe said. “The speed and the consumerization of it is really impressive.”

Using Data to Achieve Efficiencies at Scale

Wilson recounted her previous experience at a multibillion-dollar construction materials company that grew via acquisitions to more than 200 manufacturing locations. The fragmented structure of the company’s components meant multiple customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. 

“The challenging part was integrating those,” she said. “We realized we needed to get smarter about how we can leverage the power of our manufacturing footprint to improve things like on-time delivery for customers and as a go-to-market as one sales team.”

Wilson said her team worked with Kickstarter’s technology organization to conceptualize what kind of architecture, tools, and systems they needed—including ERP and CRM systems—as well as the processes they needed to put in place “to make sure we have the right policies and practices around clean data.”

The Path Forward

Kutcher also had a bright view about what AI can do with quality inputs.

“I’m actually remarkably optimistic about the path forward, in part because one of the things we are learning is: You can pull an awful lot out of existing systems and find ways to make great use out of it,” he said. “What we’re doing with generative AI already is a great demonstration of that—and, by the way, that’s only going to get better as we go.”

Rowe said the growth of AI has put pressure on companies to think more strategically about investing, as well as how to analyze data to generate insights with far greater speed than was possible before.

“It’s an exciting time to be part of finance as well as part of IT, and we both need each other just as much.”

This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Workday’s Global CFO AI Indicator Report

The Mandate for Business Agility

How Artificial Intelligence will Impact the CFO

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Offsite 2024: Investing in Our People

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Each year we bring our team together for our corporate offsite. This year Revelwoodians came from near and far – from the Tri-State area near our New Jersey-based headquarters to the Greater Boston area, the West Coast (specifically, California and Washington), Florida and even Scotland. 

Offsite gives us an opportunity to learn, share, bond and have fun with each other. While the content varies year-to-year, the objective of our offsite stays the same – to reinforce our culture and create an environment to work better together.

“On one hand, offsite can be costly,” said Ken Wolf, CEO, Revelwood. “That includes not just direct costs, but the opportunity costs of taking two full billing days out of our monthly cycle. On the other hand – offsite is priceless. It serves as a time to bring together a largely remote organization, get the team away from the day-to-day work, and help them learn, help our clients and get to know each other better. We reinforce our core values, and most importantly, we have fun together.”

This year’s offsite included bringing a guest speaker from Princeton University to share his thoughts on Generative AI (artificial intelligence), the team meeting our new managing director for Europe, Jonathan Dunn and our new director for Latin America, Hector Osuna.  

“This was my first offsite,” said Shammah Momplaisir, FP&A consultant, Revelwood. “I really enjoyed it. It was a great balance of meetings, planned activities for bonding, and time to ourselves. One of the fun events was our AMBA (mini-basketball) tournament. I didn’t make it to the playoffs, so I sat with the scorekeepers. To make it even more fun, I decided to serve as the commentator for the tournament. It ramped up the energy – even though it was late at night.”

Mary Luchs, a senior consultant at Revelwood, enjoys the mix of work and fun. “Offsite reminds us to rely on each other,” commented Mary. “The informal aspect of offsite provides some of the most value – you get to talk to and hang out with people you don’t work with on a day-to-day basis. You can carpool to activities with other Revelwoodians you might not know well. It helps to create a sense of team purpose.”

One highlight of the annual meeting is our Core Value Awards ceremony. Our core values are a fundamental part of Revelwood’s culture, and we talk about them every day. Each and every Revelwoodian lives our core values. 

Before offsite, our leadership team identified individuals who stood out with respect to our core values. This year’s Core Values Awards ceremony recognized our team members who embody these values. Our Core Values are:

  • Be Passionate
  • Do the Right Thing
  • Take Initiative
  • It’s About the Team
  • Take Pride in Your Work
  • We Care

Some years – such as this year – the leadership team decides to recognize one individual as the Ideal Revelwoodian. This award is not given out every year – it’s for when someone goes far above and beyond expectations. This year we bestowed the award on Dave Miersch, our Workday Adaptive Planning practice leader.

“Our investment in offsite creates magic,” added Ken. “We come out of offsite with a better, smarter, more connected team. They are passionate about helping to make our clients successful, to grow our business, and to help us achieve our goals.”

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Workday’s Global CFO AI Indicator Report

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This a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, highlighting key findings in the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report,” which Workday commissioned with FT Longitude. 

While the opportunity for AI in finance is nearly unlimited, it can also be overwhelming. To clarify a path forward, we created the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report,” commissioned with FT Longitude.

The CFO role has always been a pressure cooker—but today’s finance leaders face higher expectations than ever. To fulfill their charge of increasing efficiency and managing costs while driving deeper insights, CFOs understand they need to embrace the promise of AI.

The potential value is huge: generative AI can cut through lengthy reports by highlighting relevant information. It can automate repetitive manual tasks such as gathering and reconciling information at period end. It can detect anomalies and manage exceptions with lightning speed, providing real-time recommendations so teams can turn their attention to higher-value strategic work.

While the opportunity for AI in finance is nearly unlimited, it can also be overwhelming. To clarify a path forward, we created the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report: Four Steps for Finance Leaders to Expedite Time to Value with AI,” commissioned with FT Longitude. Through extensive research this global report explains AI’s impact on everyday finance duties and underscores the urgent need for finance leaders to start embracing AI and explore use cases.

In the words of Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, AI gives CFOs a “wonderful opportunity to revisit the fundamentals of value creation, capital allocation, capital management, and regulatory and organizational compliance.”

AI Pioneers: Paving the Way

To serve as our North Star, we separated the top third of all respondents—including CEOs and the heads of finance, IT, and HR—who responded to our survey, based on their level of AI investment and adoption maturity. This cohort, which we call the AI Pioneers, has already embraced AI to work more efficiently and create significant value.

Among AI Pioneers, 195 of those are in finance. They are working faster and more efficiently, finding more opportunities to reduce risk, and delivering significant strategic value to the business.

These respondents also express higher confidence in AI’s ability to deliver key benefits. Consider: more than half of finance AI Pioneers (52%) call the technology a gamechanger for the finance industry, compared to 39% of finance respondents overall. Similarly, 43% of finance AI Pioneers say AI will drive increased revenue and profits, and 39% believe it will boost data-driven decision-making, versus just 30% and 32%, respectively, of overall finance executives.

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Based on our research, we expect this divide between AI early adopters and everyone else to continue to grow. This gap will be particularly problematic in the finance world, where they have been slightly slower to adopt and implement AI than those in other functions: only 31% of finance teams have made good progress in deploying AI to automate workflows, while 32% of HR teams and 41% of IT teams have done so.

To follow AI pioneers in creating an actionable AI strategy, finance should start to get their data in order, and then implement small, tangible use cases that produce immediate results. From there, confidence and investments in the technology can expand.

The Data Imperative: Why Strong Data Management Matters

Managing ever-increasing sources of data is proving to be a significant struggle for finance. In fact, 63% acknowledge that their company’s data is somewhat or completely siloed. This doesn’t bode well for AI, which relies on clean data to deliver high-quality outputs. To truly harness the power of AI, finance teams first need a strong data foundation that can unify and contextualize disparate data sources.

Right now, finance teams everywhere have room for improvement in this realm. Only 7% of finance AI Pioneers find their data fully accessible, while a staggering 41% report siloed data. Among other finance teams, it’s even worse, at 47%. Because they’re naturally positioned to lead the implementation of AI in data-focused processes, finance departments should embrace a robust data strategy immediately so they can reap AI benefits down the line.

Creating Value: Hitting the Gas on Finance Transformation

As finance teams’ age-old responsibilities around reporting cash flow, investments, and P&Ls become increasingly automated, CFOs face a growing imperative to lean into value creation through improved access to data and deeper, more informed analysis. With AI-enabled workflows, today’s CFOs are in a unique position to connect the dots and become a key value architect within their organization.

No wonder, then, that AI Pioneers are already seeing the benefits of AI to improve value delivery. Only 23% of this group expressed dissatisfaction with the number of administrative tasks their teams need to complete—versus 34% of finance respondents overall.

Leaning in: The Best Way to Mitigate Risk

While the repetitive tasks in the finance function provide obvious use cases for AI, the function’s emphasis on risk mitigation and predictability make it understandably skeptical of the technology’s potential pitfalls. 

In fact, 35% of finance leaders report finance and accounting as the area of the business least prepared for AI and ML integration, with cybersecurity, compliance, and privacy capabilities a close second at 30%. In addition, when we asked finance heads to what extent they were concerned about specific issues which might arise as AI and ML become more integrated within their function, we found that 36% believed a lack of AI and ML transparency would weaken security and compliance. 

We also asked respondents what they believed would be the biggest risks to AI and ML adoption in finance, finding additional concerns around errors, bias, and security (see below).

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Though it may at first seem counterintuitive, the best response to these valid concerns is to get your data in order and lean into early adoption. Not only does embracing AI allow finance teams to acclimate to the technology faster than competitors, but the AI itself will mature and become better as it ingests more data. Despite skepticism, the time to adopt AI is now.

As the “CFO AI Indicator” report concludes: “Finance may be a naturally risk-averse, careful segment of the business, but it is also one of the most promising areas in which remarkable innovation and change is possible.” By embracing AI and building a robust data strategy, finance teams can emerge as changemakers within their organization, fearlessly pushing beyond traditional roles to create new value.

Get your roadmap to value creation here: “Global CFO AI Indicator Report: Four Steps for Finance Leaders to Expedite Time to Value with AI.”

For insight into additional aspects of the C-suite and early adopter advantage, download “C-Suite Global AI Indicator Report: AI Is the Ultimate Level-Up.”

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Mandate for Business Agility

How Artificial Intelligence will Impact the CFO

Fortune Interview with Workday’s CFO on Artificial Intelligence

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Workday Adaptive Planning Named a Leader in Gartner’s 2023 Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software

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Workday has been named a Leader for Workday Adaptive Planning in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Financial Planning Software. Gartner defines Leaders as those vendors “in the strongest position to influence the market’s growth and direction and are quick to provide mature offerings that meet market demand …They demonstrate a market-defining vision of how financial planning software can help FP&A leaders achieve their business objectives by providing oversight into financial and key operational data and enabling data-driven decisions, trend identification and essential insights for enterprise-wide planning.”

Workday was included in the Leader quadrant as a result of its implementation strategy, offering strategy and reporting tools.

According to Gartner, “The financial planning software market has shifted to meet the needs of FP&A leaders who are now seeking more agile processes to navigate the evolving landscape of enterprise-level risks, including the need for real-time predictive insights and flexibility in financial strategies … Additionally, these solutions provide adaptability and collaboration for tighter operational and financial performance feedback loops, extending their adoption across the enterprise.”

The annual report provides insight and analysis on vendors who deliver solutions that “facilitate FP&A transformation and covers planning, budgeting, forecasting, modelling, performance reporting and agile insights.” It also details five “noteworthy” trends in the market:

  • Increasing investments in AI/ML predictive capabilities
  • Greater transparency in AI/ML predictive results
  • Enhanced IBP (integrated business planning) through extended financial processes
  • Evolution of NLP (natural language processing)
  • Increases in cross-functional collaboration

This year’s Magic Quadrant provides insight and analysis on the following vendors in the market:

  • Acterys
  • Anaplan
  • Board
  • IBM
  • Insightsoftware
  • Jedox
  • Keplon
  • OneStream
  • Oracle
  • Planful
  • Prophix
  • SAP
  • Vena
  • Wolters Kluwer
  • Workday

Read the report today!

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Revelwood’s Expansion in Europe

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Earlier in the year I met with Ken Wolf and he shared with me the phenomenal success Revelwood has had in the US over the years. We talked through bringing that success to Europe. It really didn’t take long for both Ken and me to get excited about combining my experience with Revelwood’s track record of success in solutions for the Office of Finance.  We spent the next few months diving into the details of how we could make this happen……. Jump forward and I’ve joined Revelwood as Managing Director and we’ve launched the European business. 

You may ask what excited me about this opportunity.

After doing a lot of intel gathering on Revelwood, Workday Adaptive Planning and the market, it was a pretty easy decision to make. The size of the opportunity and the positive impact that Revelwood can have on the European market is significant. I was also impressed with the appetite Workday Adaptive Planning has to grow and invest in Europe. One other key factor…… The product is really good.

You talk about the size of the opportunity; can you give us an indication of what you see this being?

Well, I don’t want to give away our secret sauce today, however, what I can say is the range and number of companies that can benefit from a really good FP&A tool is enormous. It’s the full business spectrum from a fast-growing SME all the way up to top FTSE100 companies. Even a well-funded startup with an aggressive growth trajectory would hugely benefit from Workday Adaptive Planning.

So going back to why Revelwood?

Don’t get me wrong, all of the above is hugely important for any business to survive, grow and expand. However, the other key element is people and culture. It’s so important for successful businesses to have great people, enjoying what they do. I met with the senior management team before I joined and it was very clear that they all had a high level of energy and enthusiasm about Revelwood, the journey they have been on to date, and – importantly – the journey that sits ahead of us in the U.S., Europe & Latin America. Not surprisingly over my first few weeks of being at Revelwood, I saw this was the same energy and enthusiasm from the whole team. It’s quite special. There is a big focus on culture and enjoyment, which not only drives good internal behaviors but also exceptional client engagement. This is so important when we’re helping our clients unlock significant business value. I’m looking forward to building the Revelwood team in Europe and bringing that same special energy and enthusiasm to our European clients.

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