Why AI Makes it Easier for FP&A to Understand the Company’s Financial Health

Today, 27% of job listings for CFOs mention AI, which is an important indication of how vital AI awareness of expertise is for strategic finance roles. This is in large part because AI makes finance departments more effective, more efficient and more precise without requiring additional workforce. Instead, it empowers FP&A professionals, and others, to do their job as they’ve always wanted to do it. 

FP&A Without Data Silos

FP&A departments need to know about every aspect of their company, meaning that they often represent one of the few touchpoints where many different data sets and areas come together so that the connections and mutual dependencies and knock-on effects can be examined. 

Doing this effectively is critical for scenario planning, financial modeling, forecasting revenues, and other vital functions. Unless you have the whole picture, you can’t confidently analyze the connections between the pieces and what the impact of any changes might be, never mind plan around it all. 

For this reason, data silos are the enemy of FP&A success. Until Firmbase made it easy and intuitive to unify disparate sets of data in a single platform, and use agentic AI to investigate and analyze the data and gain real-time insights quickly and reliably, data silos were frequently a fact of FP&A life. 

Once an automated platform gathers all the required data from many different systems in real time, all this changes. FP&A has up-to-date information from all the internal and external sources it requires, right at its fingertips. Teams can understand the company’s financial health more accurately, with less effort. 

FP&A Gains Insight into Real-time Reality 

Some FP&A plans are deep-laid, and some analyses are months of work. A lot of the time, however, FP&A professionals need to know the situation on the ground right now. These are just a small number of the reasons that real-time data is valuable in FP&A:

• Tracking and addressing budget vs. actuals discrepancies before they become large-scale problems
• Tracking shifting drivers and their business effects
• Identifying growing opportunities 
• Identifying unexpected weaknesses or risks
• Identifying disconnects between departments that may negatively impact the business
• Identifying external trends which need to be addressed internally

With AI, FP&A teams can be confident that they always have real-time access to the reality their business is experiencing, so that they can adapt their priorities and their recommendations accordingly. Teams can even set alerts up in their systems so that changes within certain parameters trigger flags, enabling FP&A teams to be instantly informed and agile. 

Automate Manual FP&A Workload

FP&A is definitively a strategic role, but historically there was a considerable manual workload that accompanied it as well. This wasn’t because it was intrinsically necessary for the strategists themselves to do it, but because the data gathering, cleaning, analysis and reporting needed to happen in order to make anything else possible.

With Firmbase AI, teams can now automate up to 80% of their manual FP&A workload, which completely changes the picture of what can happen within a week. 

Rather than spending time on repetitive, low level, time-consuming tasks, FP&A professionals can focus their attention and energies on what the data means for the company, what should be done as a result, and how to achieve that. 

Create Forecasts and Plan New Scenarios 10x Faster

For a role that centers around planning and forecasting and the recommendations around that, FP&A traditionally had to spend a lot of time working with the past. The shift from manual to automation changes that. 

Rather than having to manually gather, update, calculate and analyze data when things change, teams using Firmbase and therefore leveraging AI can forecast and plan new scenarios 10x times faster than before. In turn, this means FP&A can work more effectively to ensure the company’s financial health tomorrow as well as today. 

Oftentimes, multiple relevant and impactful elements change on what can feel like a daily basis, so this speed in combination with the real-time reality discussed earlier ensures that the work of FP&A teams serves the needs of their organization. In turn, that means that FP&A can have the impact it deserves within the company so that financial health is not just understood, but protected. 

Next-level Internal Collaboration 

AI, perhaps counterintuitively, increases and improves collaboration between departments. This is a factor that often goes underappreciated, but it’s a strong repeating trend for companies using Firmbase. 

There are a number of elements that play into this, but it makes sense when you consider that having better and deeper data from more sources, in real time, with instant analysis, makes it far easier to ground regular discussions and decisions in data. Firmbase’s platform also makes it far easier to evolve and work with a shared business understanding, strategy and language. 

All of this means that FP&A teams have a much stronger insight into the company’s financial health, and more powerful levers to ensure success going forward. While data is at the heart of the role, understanding why things are happening and making changes when they are necessary is something that can only be done effectively through relationships, partnerships and collaboration across departments. 

Avoiding Errors

Having a true comprehension of the company’s financial health simply isn’t possible when errors creep into data sets and calculations and skew the analysis unchecked. With AI, it’s much easier to identify and prevent data errors. A seamless automation is far more reliable than juggling Excel cells. 

This has a positive knock-on effect on many aspects of the FP&A role. Not only do professionals not have to spend large amounts of time tracking down mistakes, fixing them, and chasing their permutations and effects through other spreadsheets and systems, they can also make their calculations and decisions with far greater confidence from the start. 

More Data, More Time, Better Resources

Understanding a company’s financial health is a complex, multi-layered process. It’s also at the heart of what gives FP&A the ability to contribute significantly to a business’ success. 

The more that FP&A teams can expand their sources of data, the more they can ensure that their picture of the company’s financial health is accurate, relevant and a solid basis for decisions on how to move forward. There is a natural upper limit to how expansive teams can be when working mostly manually, but when handling the data can be handed off to AI, this changes entirely. 

At the same time, the more an FP&A team can remove manual, error-prone, time-consuming tasks from their daily work, the more efficient and effective the department as a whole becomes at both understanding the company’s financial health and acting to ensure its future success. With AI, this becomes not only possible but easy.