Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) Transformation

Improve forecast precision and deliver decision-ready insights that drive growth in FP&A

Download Leadership Vision 2025: FP&A Report

Set and execute a winning vision for 2025.

By clicking the "Continue" button, you are agreeing to the Gartner Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Contact Information

All fields are required.

  • Step 2 of 3

    Back

    By clicking the "Continue" button, you are agreeing to the Gartner Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

    Company/Organization Information

    All fields are required.

    Optional

  • Step 3 of 3

    Back

    By clicking the "Submit" button, you are agreeing to the Gartner Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

    Leadership Vision for FP&A

    The 2025 Gartner Leadership Vision for Financial Planning and Analysis research outlines the top 3 priorities FP&A leaders and their teams are focused on in 2025 and actions they should take to achieve these goals in the coming year.

    Download our eBook to uncover how FP&A Leaders can successfully navigate uncertainty and drive business goals with a particular focus on how to:

    • Provide valuable business insights
    • Deliver business partnership that supports better decision making
    • Ensure ROI on investments in artificial intelligence (AI)

    FP&A must drive profitable business decisions

    As companies increase investments in advanced analytics, CFOs and their FP&A leaders are well positioned to provide precise forecasts and actionable insights to support quick and accurate decision making.

    However, dispersed organizational data and outdated, non-standardized reporting processes mean financial planning and analysis teams often fail to provide clear, decision-ready insights that businesses need to drive growth. Additionally, our analysis shows only 3% of companies have strategic, operational and financial planning processes that are fully aligned and integrated.
    73% of finance functions favor a centralized, tightly governed source for data.

    How we address your top financial planning and analysis challenges

    FP&A leaders are pressed to deliver accurate forecasts, high-quality decision support and actionable insights in decentralized organizational structures and often with limited resources. Our trusted research, expert advice and robust benchmarks help CFOs and their corporate finance teams transform financial planning and analysis capabilities and support strategic decisions that grow the business.

    Define the scope of finance analytics

    Demand for analytic-driven decision making across the business has continuously increased. FP&A leaders must identify the key business decisions to support with finance analytics. Download Gartner’s quick guide to understand what analysis should and should not be supported by FP&A.

    Define FP&A Scope

    Deliver high-quality financial analysis

    Finance invests a lot in financial analysis, but CFOs don’t see much return. Finance analytics are often misinterpreted or misused. High-quality financial planning and analysis can improve decision outcomes by up to 1% of sales. Learn how to deliver top-quartile financial planning and analysis.

    Improve FP&A Insights

    Transition to rolling forecasts

    Traditional forecasting methods are based on static, outdated data and are not able to support high-quality decisions in today’s fast-paced business environment. Rolling forecasting provides better visibility into future outcomes. Use this forcasting model to identify novel risks and inform operational and strategic decisions.

    Transform Forecasting

    Optimize FP&A performance

    Only 13% of organizations identify performance issues before they hit financials, while 81% of organizations take too long to remediate performance issues. Learn how the best CFOs and financial planning and analysis teams identify issues early and shorten the process from identification to resolution.

    Optimize Performance

    Explore what Gartner for Finance can do for you
    Learn More

    See how Gartner supports FP&A leaders

    Article

    Transform Finance Business Partnering

    To provide the proactive, differentiated support the organization needs, changes to the finance business partner model are required. Download Gartner's eBook and learn to drive financially sound operational decisions.

    View Business Partnering Guide

    Research

    Deliver Finance Analytics that Optimize Decision-Making

    Equip your Finance organization to generate finance analytics that are capable of fueling growth by significantly improving business decisions. Review our best-practice insights here.

    View Finance Analytics insights

    Research

    Zero-based Budgeting: Separating Fact from Fiction

    Learn about the rationale for a zero-based budgeting system, the myths surrounding zero-based budgeting and effective implementation techniques to realize value within the finance function.

    View Budgeting Research

    Without the right KPIs, you can ultimately make decisions that aren’t based on information that’s relevant to those decisions.

    Colt Meraw

    Director of FP&A, Urban Institute

    Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo™

    Gather alongside your peers in National Harbor to gain insight on emerging trends, receive one-on-one guidance from a Gartner expert and create a strategy to tackle your priorities head-on.

    View Conference Calendar

    Financial planning and analysis questions Gartner can help answer

    The financial planning and analytics team plays a critical role in the organization’s financial strategy by performing budgeting, forecasting and analysis to support strategic decisions being made by business leaders. 

    By delivering critical data and analysis, FP&A can improve the quality of business decisions, ultimately enabling business leaders to drive enterprise strategy more effectively.

    Dedicated software and technology can make the budgeting and forecasting process quicker and more accurate. To leverage these technologies effectively, FP&A leaders need to set data-governance standards and establish shared buy-in with business leaders on the drivers of performance that budgets and forecasts track. In ensuring the right inputs, FP&A builds confidence among business leaders that the decisions they are making take into account the right financial variables and priorities.

    Finance increasingly needs to provide operational or enterprisewide decision support to highly complex business structures. The ongoing standardization and automation of processes and transactions lends itself to centralization, but decision support is often better served by assigning FP&A teams (physically or remotely) to individual business units. 

    The objective is to organize the finance function to improve the quality and impact of finance analytics. One option is the “hub-and-spoke” model in which a centralized center of excellence (hub) owns some of the more strategic analytics and is linked to “spokes” embedded in the business. In this model, the hub executes multivariate tests recommended by the spokes to produce constructive insights such as profitable-growth targets, customer and product profitability models, and strategic pricing information.

    FP&A leaders need to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to data analytics and digital input. To ensure the quality of their data analysis, FP&A leaders need to focus on:

    1. Financial data management: Streamlining financial information, structuring data and standardizing data definitions to create a high-quality data environment that ensures information integrity while enabling faster and more impactful analysis of business problems. 
    2. Finance analytics: Applying specialized and semiautonomous (i.e., machine-driven) analytics methods to create more insight-driven and impactful analysis for business decision makers. 
    3. Metrics and management reporting: Aligning reporting processes and content with user needs while also ensuring efficiency. 

    Gartner’s finance experts are trusted, objective advisors for 1,750+ finance organizations.

    Gartner for Finance Leaders provides insights, advice and tools to help finance leaders make the right decisions to drive business results.
    Become a Client