Don Mal | Board chair at Una Software, a performance planning platform combining dynamic FP&A, revenue intelligence & AI-driven forecasting.
My last article examined the lifestyle factor in FP&A software and its essential role in saving a shrinking accounting profession. This one speaks to a subject that’s been brewing far longer, and one that’s familiar to any CFO who’s heard the same promise for decades: the evolution of finance from reactive reporting to strategic business function.
For most of my career working with the Office of Finance, CFOs and software vendors (my own included) have confidently been declaring that finance was on the cusp of transformation. We spoke of moving beyond “bean counting” and expense management toward forward-thinking, strategic partnership with the rest of the organization. Finance wouldn’t just be the trusted guardian of the company’s most sensitive data, but its trusted advisor charting the future.
It was a compelling vision. And I was fortunate to help advance it at three exceptional companies. We worked with hundreds of CFOs to move closer to that ideal. We did it by connecting the Excel spreadsheets finance relied upon to the underlying data driving them. We automated the labor-intensive, copy-and-paste minutiae that consumed so much time. We brought it all to the cloud for rapid adoption.
The Strategic Finance Gap Persists
Yet nearly two decades later, the promise remains largely unfulfilled.
Nearly 80% of CFOs today still haven’t adopted what I’d consider a modern planning solution. And 45% still rely on Excel as their dominant tool for budgeting, forecasting and business planning. While SaaS FP&A adoption continues to grow, it hasn’t yet crossed the chasm—particularly in the midmarket.
To understand why, let me first clarify what everyone means when we say “strategic finance.” It’s not simply having a better tool. It’s the fundamental shift from finance as a cost center focused on compliance and historical reporting, to finance as a growth engine that informs decision-making, identifies opportunities and mitigates risk—in real time.
Strategic finance means your CFO and team spend their days analyzing “what if” scenarios, identifying correlations between operational metrics and financial performance, forecasting with confidence and providing real-time insights that shape strategy. It means moving from answering “What happened?” to answering “What should we do?”
The barrier to this evolution hasn’t been conceptual. Every CFO understands the vision. It’s been practical.
Achieving strategic finance requires breaking free from the spreadsheet treadmill and building systems that liberate finance teams from grunt work. Historically, that required significant investment, organizational change and new skill sets. Many organizations weighed the effort and decided to stay the course.
AI changes that calculation entirely.
Why AI Is Different
1. It’s Everywhere
Virtually every FP&A platform on the market now includes built-in AI capabilities. Half of all ERP systems will even feature generative AI within the next year or two. Some platforms are AI-native—built from the ground up for the AI era.
And here’s the critical part: Entry-level pricing for many solutions is less than the cost of a part-time analyst.
The software exists. It’s affordable. It’s ready to deploy.
2. You’ve Got The Skills
AI doesn’t require your finance team to learn new capabilities; it leverages the data they’re already analyzing manually. More importantly, the interface isn’t Excel or complex SQL—it’s almost all natural language query (NLQ). You ask questions in plain English, and the software understands.
The training burden is minimal. Most teams need only a few hours learning to formulate effective prompts. Many vendors now include prompt libraries or guided wizards, making solutions usable virtually out of the box.
It should come as no surprise that 80% of AI and natural language query users will be outside IT by next year. Finance will definitely be among them.
3. The FOMO Factor
I thought integrated ERP systems would catch on explosively. I thought cloud adoption would create a competitive stampede. I wasn’t wrong, but neither approach created the urgency there is surrounding AI.
Last year, 87% of CFOs believed generative AI would drive efficiency and effectiveness—a staggering jump from just 15% the previous year. The gap between believers and skeptics has never been wider. And the early adopters are already capturing measurable gains in efficiency, insight generation and growth identification.
The Strategic Finance Moment
For the first time in two decades, the pieces align perfectly.
The technology that can finally liberate finance teams from spreadsheet labor is accessible, affordable and requires no new expertise. AI doesn’t just make finance professionals’ lives easier; it makes them strategic.
Your team can finally spend time on analysis instead of data wrangling. They can identify patterns and correlations in datasets that would take weeks to uncover manually. They can model scenarios, stress-test assumptions and provide forward-looking guidance that actually informs strategy.
That’s what strategic finance looks like.
If you’ve been waiting on the wrong side of the chasm—watching the transformation everyone promised but never quite arrived—now is the moment.
The software is ready. Your team has the skills. And the competitive advantage of early adoption won’t wait long.
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