What Your FP&A Team Won't Tell You
Your FP&A team has opinions about your systems. They're probably not sharing them. Here's what they're thinking, and why it matters more than you realise.
The silence isn't agreement
Your FP&A analysts know your systems are broken. They've known for a while. They're not telling you because the last time someone suggested a new platform, it went nowhere and the person who raised it got landed with a "process improvement" project on top of their day job.
So they stay quiet. They build workarounds. They maintain the spreadsheets. They do the job they were hired to do, which increasingly isn't the job they signed up for.
What they're actually thinking
"I spend 70% of my time on data prep and 30% on analysis. I got a master's degree for the 30%."
"I could build this model in a proper tool in a week. In Excel it took six months and it breaks every time someone adds a cost centre."
"The new analyst we hired lasted four months. She went to a company with Anaplan. I can't blame her."
"I don't raise it because I don't want to own the implementation project. I just want better tools."
None of these are fictional. They're composites from conversations we've had with dozens of FP&A teams over the past five years. The wording changes. The sentiment doesn't.
Why this matters commercially
Every month your FP&A team spends on manual work is a month they're not doing the analysis that drives decisions. The cost isn't just the salary. It's the insight deficit.
It's the strategic decisions being made without the modelling that should inform them. It's the board meeting where the answer is "we'll get back to you" instead of "here's the scenario." It's the retention risk that compounds every quarter as your best people see what their peers are working with at other companies.
The average tenure of an FP&A analyst at a company with poor systems is measurably shorter than at companies with modern planning tools. We don't have a research paper to cite for that. We just see it, repeatedly, in the companies we work with before and after transformation.
The question nobody asks properly
If you want to know what your team actually thinks about your planning systems, ask them. But ask properly. Not "are you happy with Excel?" They'll say yes, because they don't want the project, the risk, or the spotlight.
Ask: "If you could redesign how we do planning from scratch, what would you change first?"
Then be ready for an honest answer. Because they've been thinking about it for longer than you realise.
A structured way to have the conversation
Our FP&A Maturity Assessment gives you a structured framework for exactly this conversation. It covers process maturity, technology readiness, team capability, and data quality. No sign-up required. It takes 10 minutes and gives you a clear picture of where the gaps are.
It's not a sales funnel. It's a diagnostic. Use it to start a conversation with your team that's overdue.