State of Finance Tech: Financial Planning & Analysis – State of Finance Tech

One of the most fundamental shifts in the role of the CFO this century has been from being the custodians of records and compliance to also becoming a trusted advisor for strategy.

A key enabler of this shift has been the emergence of powerful technology tools for supporting financial planning and analysis. Over time those capabilities have evolved from spreadsheets to structured reporting tools, to powerful business intelligence suites, and more recently, to big data applications.

Modern financial planning and analysis tools contain functionality for analysing financial data to support better decision making, but increasingly these tools are being called upon to model different scenarios and support predictions, often by incorporating non-financial data sources.

In this way financial planning and analysis tools are helping finance professionals evolve from their traditional role in describing the past or current state of the organisation to predicting its future, and even prescribing the actions needed to reach the best possible version of that future.

According to the Business Research Company, the global market for financial planning software tools was worth US$4.91 billion ($7.81 billion) in 2024 and will grow to reach US$5.74 billion ($9.12 billion) this year. Numerous reasons for this growth are cited, including economic recovery, a focus on ESG investing, and regulatory compliance solutions, with major trends listed as AI and machine learning integration, robo-advisors, blockchain integration, collaboration with fintech startups, and user-friendly interfaces, as well as a surge in mobile applications.

Future vision

For some organisations, such as the suspension parts company Zeder Corporation, accurate forecasting has now become a matter of life and death. With 35,000 products and operations spread across four countries, senior management accountant Dean Nicolaides described his team’s use of specialist forecasting software from Phocas as essential to the group’s operation.

“We need to be able to quickly access data and structure it in a way that we can use it to create the reporting that the management teams and the executive teams want to see on a monthly basis,” Nicolaides said.

“It is about speed, it is about quality of data, and having that data ready to go once the accounts have been closed by the accounting function.”

While many organisations use multipurpose reporting and visualisation tools such as Microsoft’s Power BI or even Excel, Nicolaides said the benefit of a specialised tool was its ability to automate many reporting processes, such as creating dashboards for management.

“We don’t have to do any manual work on that at all – it is completely automated –we can open the dashboard in Phocas, and it will tell us how we are tracking for the month,” Nicolaides said.

“The focus for our team is to use Phocas to take us away from preparing numbers and reports and get us on to the value-adding and analytics that the business wants.”