🍿 The Great Unbundling

I’ve stopped trusting any tool that promises to “transform the function” by Tuesday. 

Real CFOs know change in finance doesn’t land with a big bang. It’s quiet…one workflow, done properly, before you move on to the next.

That’s exactly what global sport platform Fanatics did when they adopted Summation. They started with reporting. Not a rip-and-replace job, nor a six-month implementation. Just the recurring work that was eating up the team’s week, handed off to Summation (just like you would a new analyst), running automatically overnight. Traced to source and audit-ready by morning, ready to sip on… like a fresh cup of coffee.

Then the questions started to change. Less “will we have the number by Thursday?!” and more “what caused this margin movement, and how do we fix it?”

You know, the kind of work analysts were hired to do but never had the hours for. That’s how Fanatics uncovered $10m in growth and savings using Summation. 

I think the long-term future of the FP&A function is genuinely uncertain.

Not “uncertain” in the PR sense, where a company says the outlook is uncertain shortly before nuking half the team.

Literally… What is FP&A in the long run? And what is it not?

I find it much easier to visualize a post-AI controlling function than a post-AI FP&A function.

There will always be a need for controllership. It may be much smaller. It may be staffed by fewer, more technical, more systems-literate people, and the agents supporting them.

But, in a way, controllership has a moat around it: accounting rules, audit requirements, compliance obligations, and legal accountability.

FP&A is less obvious.

Look back at the seven activity buckets we have used throughout this series. Planning. Forecasting. Reporting. Analysis. Business finance. Strategic finance. Infrastructure.

It’s real work, but the much harder question is where should that work sit?

Finance is not the only function being redrawn. Data teams are growing. IT teams are growing. Strategy and growth teams are becoming more finance-capable. Operators have better tools. Business leaders have more direct access to information.

AI is redrawing the lines between functions, not just redrawing work inside them.

So yes, FP&A work may become more strategic, more automated, more embedded, and more valuable.

But I am not convinced it will all sit inside a function that looks like today’s FP&A.

Data, insight, reporting, workflow, and business decision support could sit under the CFO in a broader definition of FP&A. But finance will have to prove it deserves to own that territory…

It could just as easily become a C-suite role in its own right, led by someone with a PhD in data science, an MBA, and 15 years of operating experience.

If finance wants to run what we currently call FP&A work in ten years, it has a point to prove.

We need to do a better job.

In week one, we dug into why FP&A functions often create too much busywork for the business, and why the only thing that really matters, is impact.

In week two, we atomized the FP&A activity stack into 35 sub-activities across seven buckets, and worked through which ones your business actually needs, and when.

Last week, we explored how to turn that activity stack into a working FP&A function.

This week, we switch directions. 

We are looking at where FP&A might be heading next.

Yes, I know.

Your inbox is already full of confident-sounding finance predictions.

Open LinkedIn on any given morning and you’ll find someone explaining that the CFO is dead, the analyst is dead, Excel is dead, forecasting is dead, dashboards are dead, and finance itself is now just six Claude prompts wearing a trench coat.

I dearly hope there is never a high-profile CFO murder... Detectives will have thousands of false leads to chase down if they open LinkedIn.

It’s all very exciting.

The problem is that 99% of these predictions are produced by AI, a marketer, a ghostwriter, or someone who has never led a real finance function in the wild.

Which means they all converge on the same themes.

Same median answers. Same definite tone. Same shaky foundations.

So a home truth: no one has a clue where this all ends up… including me.

The crowd is usually wrong about this stuff. Not always on direction, but almost always on timing, severity, and the important details.

And I’ll probably be no different. But at least I’ll be wrong from first principles (and based on 20 years leading FP&A teams)…

So no, this is not a prophecy; it’s more a set of ‘working hunches’.

Here are seven ways we might (or might not) see FP&A change over the next decade:

For the last twenty years, the FP&A software complex has been built on one promise: Put everything on our platform and the whole FP&A function will work like magic. The whole FP&A cycled riven from one place.

So you take the plunge. You invest six figures in annual licenses. Another six figures in implementation fees. And … you consume every waking minute of capacity and energy in your team to land it.

After a twelve-month implementation roadmap, you get your budget and forecasting model into the software. Well, most of it. That tricky newly acquired subsidiary will have to be “phase two.” So will the dashboards, variance analysis, and everything else.

Technically, it can do it all.

But loading actuals in is just so damn hard.

So the team quietly does the analysis in Excel. “Don’t tell the boss, it’s only for this month.”

A few years pass. A new CFO arrives. They decide the business needs a proper reporting and consolidation platform to bring actuals, budgets, and forecasts into one place.

Suddenly, the “one platform to rule them all” FP&A tool becomes a subservient piece of a bigger tech puzzle.

Then month-end comes around, and you realize the detail needed for real bridges, root cause, and performance insight still isn’t there.

So now you need a BI tool as well. Sound familiar?

This is the legacy FP&A software trap.

The promise of better workflow and version control, while the reality is an expensive native platform trying to force your business, process, data, and analysis into its guardrails.

And as a result … every useful new finance question turns into an IT project (or you just reluctantly admit defeat and settle for endless spreadsheeting.)

What FP&A actually needs is much simpler: A flexible canvas sitting on top of a trusted, robust, audit-friendly data layer.

Something that meets the business where it is, rather than requiring endless contortions and expensive implementation consultants to make it fit.

Believe it or not, this used to exist.

My all-time favorite FP&A platform, Adaytum, had this spirit in the early 2000s. Then it got bought more than twenty years ago, wrapped in enterprise controls, and everything good about it was slowly consumed by a bigger machine.

I think this is a problem AI is perfectly suited to solve.

AI can collapse the gap between structured data, flexible analysis, natural-language questioning, modeling, reporting, and workflow.

The future is more likely a flexible FP&A work layer: one robust data foundation, many ways to interrogate it, model it, explain it, and turn it into action.

Less old-school mega-platform. More simple flexible canvas with trusted data layer underneath

While we are on finance tech, and specifically finance canvases, let’s talk about Excel (and spreadsheets).

There is a current fad for Claude-coded sensitivity models with sliders and shiny interfaces, declaring spreadsheets dead. These look nice, but are often designed by people who don’t really understand FP&A.

We don’t need to slide our way to an infinite number of scenarios. We need to go deep on the few that matter.

We don’t want the logic behind assumptions hidden behind a pretty interface. We want to see it, test it, break it, rebuild it, and understand exactly where the bodies are.

When Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc in 1979, they were solving a very simple problem: stop finance people having to handwrite the same calculations over and over again.

Rows. Columns. And logic to tie the two together.

Beautiful.

And humans have been organizing financial numbers into rows and columns for thousands of years. There is evidence from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt of record keeping on clay tablets to track taxes, trade, and grain reserves.

Finance is fundamentally a rows-and-columns discipline.

So when some doofus tells you Excel is the enemy, be careful.

The future of interacting with financial data might not be Excel specifically. But it will almost certainly look a lot like a spreadsheet: rows, columns, tabs, formulas, linked logic, and flexible space to think. Probably controlled via a chat interface, but always backed with your trusted data layer (see point 1).

Because that format matches how finance people understand and express themselves in numbers.

Now, Excel has absolutely been abused. It has become a closet database, shadow software layer, emergency API repair kit, broken integration workaround, and impromptu data entry form.

That doesn’t mean Excel is the problem.

That’s like asking Lionel Messi to play in goal because the goalkeeper forgot his gloves, then blaming Messi when the set-piece defending looks ropey.

Those uses should disappear, because that is not what spreadsheets were designed for, But for the things spreadsheets are good at, they are close to perfect.

Thinking. Modeling. Communicating. And that ain’t changing…

For all the good intentions around FP&A we’ve broken down in this series, a lot of the work wearing an FP&A name badge is really just a glorified information service.

The board, CEO, exec and functions all need a slightly different cut of similar information.

Your analyst takes the order, disappears into the kitchen, and returns with a spreadsheet on a little silver tray.

Like a little ‘data waiter’.

And if we are honest, this kind of work makes up a massive amount of so-called ‘FP&A’ in many teams.

Historically it’s been thought of as “value added” because expectations are low and the alternatives are poor. If the business can’t get the information itself, the person who can extract it, twist it, format it, and explain it looks useful.

But basic information packaging is exactly the kind of work AI should nuke.

It is not a big leap to imagine business users self-serving the information they need through a chatbot trained on company context, with access restricted to the data they are allowed to see.

That will raise the floor expectations on analysts quickly. Simply remixing and shuffling information around the business will have zero value.

What will endure is owning the system, definitions, context, and judgment layer that makes self-serve information reliable.

Back to where we started this post: the battle lines around FP&A work are shifting.

Some work will no longer be necessary. Some routine work will find a better home. Agents will handle some. CFOs will become more self-serve on information, pulling what they need through a chatbot rather than waiting for someone in FP&A to package it. Same for other executives, and their teas.

Step back, and I think we will see a slow-motion unbundling of FP&A.

But that does raise a question: What happens to the FP&A function itself?

Maybe the reporting lines shift over time. Governance comes less from org charts, and more from the context, permissions, standards, and guardrails given to agents. Maybe the “FP&A function” becomes smaller, sharper, and more focused on judgment, challenge, and performance.

This won’t be an overnight shift. No scaremongering here... I’ll leave that to Gerard and the rest of the LinkedIn gurus. But from first principles, it does feel like the logical long-term direction of travel.

Are there any important business decisions that do not touch finance in some way?

Very few.

Finance provides the long-term scoreboard for business: enterprise value, market cap, exit value. Adjust for time and invested capital, and most of it comes back to some version of return on investment.

The problem is that most individual decisions are difficult to connect directly to that long-term value. So we try to financialize them in the short term instead. We tie them to this year’s P&L or demand a payback calculation.

When something is hard to measure, we tend to do one of two things. Either finance is absent altogether, or we fall into a kind of false financialization. We try to put a financial value on a leadership development program, a customer service team, or a brand marketing investment.

It is the corporate equivalent of demanding an ROI calculation for a team pizza.

The answer is not to search harder for a number or measure more deeply, which is what much FP&A theory encourages us to do.

It is to build decision makers who can use finance as a thinking frame. People who understand trade-offs, opportunity cost, constraints, risk, and long-term value intuitively as part of how they make decisions.

That means externalizing FP&A and moving financial thinking into the business, rather than dragging every decision back into a spreadsheet.

This may surprise you, but I like to see financial controllers pulling the strings in a budget process.

Not setting the targets or making the big trade-off decision, but running the machinery underneath it.

In fact, I see it as a sign of maturity in a finance team.

Early on, budget ownership often sits with FP&A. The model is relatively simple, the number of contributors is limited, and the business may not yet understand its operating drivers well enough to own much of the process.

But as the business and FP&A function mature, complexity grows. More assumptions, currencies, operating locations. P&L lines, dimensions, drivers, data flows, and people feeding numbers into the process.

Eventually, most FP&A teams hit a breakpoint. The machinery becomes too complex for them to manage well while still doing the commercial work the business needs from them.

I am talking about how assumptions and numbers are pulled through the business and into the model. Consolidating submissions. Making sure the budget reconciles across the P&L, balance sheet, and cashflow. Getting the whole thing to actually add up. 

This work may be complex, but it is also routine. It is fundamentally about process, control, consistency, and reconciliation.

At that point, you need more of a financial accounting mind around the process. Someone who instinctively worries about completeness, ownership, data integrity, and how the numbers consolidate.

That suits a strong controlling team wonderfully.

A good FP&A team can do it too, but it will often make heavy weather of it. More importantly, FP&A should be focused on what the output is saying, not operating the machinery that produced it.

This is a move I have made repeatedly in finance teams I have led. I built much of my career by going into underperforming finance functions and businesses and getting them to maturity quickly.

As the team matured, the mechanics of budgets and forecasting moved toward controlling. FP&A was then freed to spend more time challenging assumptions, interpreting the outputs, and working directly with the business.

My last CAO came from a controlling background but had also spent time in FP&A. She was a very safe pair of hands for any FP&A work that was complex and repeatable. The VP of FP&A loved it. They and their crack team were free to work much, much closer to the business.

The same logic extends well beyond budgeting.

FP&A is full of work that is complex but routine: budget reconciliation, basic forecast iterations, performance reporting, and FP&A infrastructure. Increasingly, that will include owning the financial definitions and context that agents and AI tools rely on.

This all fits a capable controlling team extremely well.

Imagine plotting your current FP&A workplan on this 2x2 grid:

I think the future of finance will look increasingly like that. The central hub of FP&A gets absorbed into controlling (supported with an agent), while the support spokes move ever closer to the business.

So, now for the elephant in the room. After all this, what the hell is left? And is it really still FP&A?

Honestly, probably not. But that is okay.

As I said at the start of this series, FP&A is a set of processes and a cycle much more than it is a team or function. Those processes do not all need to sit together forever.

Once the routine work moves into controlling, automation, or self-service, what remains is the genuinely powerful support for the business.

The decisions that cannot simply be pushed into the business with a set of financial guardrails. The ones where there may be no guardrails at all. Where the trade-offs are indirect, there is a lot of uncertainty, or the consequences are just so damn big.

Things like:

These decisions need more than a model; financial judgment, commercial instinct, strategic context, and the ability to navigate trade-offs that cannot be reduced to a clean ROI calculation.

Could this work be combined with the strategy function? And corporate development? Perhaps it becomes a kind of super strategic finance team.

Unburdened by the routine and mundane, that becomes a seriously exciting function.

And it probably ends up with a new name too, something like: Strategic Finance. (I don’t love it, but let’s call it a working title for now.)

I’ll finish where I started.

These seven predictions are what I see as a decade-long direction of travel for FP&A. Some of it may take years. Some businesses are already there.

And I am probably wrong about a bunch of it… But you need some planning assumptions, right?

So, what do you do now to prepare for an uncertain future?

The answers are the same no regrets moves I’ve been banging the drum for, for a while:

So… that brings us to the end of this series on building FP&A. There is something different coming next month, but I’ll save that surprise for next week!

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Thank you to our sponsor ::
:: Summation ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

If you enjoyed today’s content, don’t forget to subscribe.

Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.