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."

Showing the bigger picture

The evolving role of financial planning and analysis has been noted by Andrew Muller, chief financial officer at the design, engineering and advisory company Aurecon. In 2021 the company implemented Workday’s Financial Management system. With that system providing ERP functionality, Muller said his job now is increasingly focused on how he presents financial information back to the business.

“If you think about the expectations of finance, it is not just that the numbers add up, its ‘what are we doing about it?’” Muller said.

“So there is that huge change towards how you look at the reporting, and how you use that to drive business performance.

“The biggest change we've seen in the last little while has been much more focus on forecasting and using that forecasting to start to drive decisions before the event, as opposed to analysing after the event.”

“We actually say that as a finance team, our job is to make sense of that data, to unpack the complexity, create the insight, and be the sense-maker to the business so that they can thrive.”

With that goal in mind Muller and his team had invested in bringing other organisation data into the forecasting process, to ensure that decisions were made using the most complete data sets.

Sustainable outcomes

One other factor that is putting financial planning and reporting capabilities into the spotlight is the impending need for many organisations to report their sustainability impact. This requirement is flowing down from large companies to their suppliers.

For Nick Romanello, financial controller at the recruitment company Synaco by Synergy, 2026 will see mandatory reporting of sustainability metrics, and that requires a significant program of work to be ready.

“If I want to accurately report on our sustainability and emissions, I need to start inputting all of this data into the system, and that is not easily extractable,” Romanello said.

“I have to put a field into our accounting systems, get someone to enter that field, and make sure that flows. And that is just one example.

“When you think about that across every supplier, suddenly that becomes a huge, huge task. The question now is where do I invest my money, or do I build it inhouse?”

As a growth-oriented business, Romanello said he had been careful to create a financial services capability that could handle the volume requirements of Synaco’s business while also meeting its requirement for analytics. Hence, he was keen to maintain a standardised environment based on MYOB’s Acumatica cloud ERP.

However, accurate reporting for the business requires data from this system to intermix with that from a host of other systems, and this was where the greatest challenge lay.

“We have three software packages that don’t talk to each other at all, but for the performance metrics and how the business is actually performing, I require it all to talk to each other,” Romanello said.

“If the team are not inputting the right information at the right spots at the right time, then what it is reporting on is not going to be relevant.”