By Mark Bodger, Director at ICit Business Intelligence

I spoke to a Head of FP&A recently. Their annual planning cycle takes four months.

The team is performing well. They’re talented, capable, experienced and know exactly what good looks like. But they’re operating inside a process that makes good FP&A almost impossible to deliver. They have over 100 spreadsheets, endless versions of files and are often working through multiple rounds of consolidation. By the time the plan is signed off, the business has already moved on. 

There’s a persistent myth in finance that long planning cycles are a sign of rigour. That the more time you spend validating, reconciling and checking, the better the outcome. In reality, the opposite is often true. Lengthy planning cycles are usually a symptom of fragility with too many handoffs and too many disconnected data sources. Also, too little confidence in the numbers. So the process expands to compensate for the number of files, reviews and time.

The cost of this is both operational and strategic.While finance is buried in process, the business is moving and decisions are being made without the benefit of timely insight. Alongside this opportunities pass before they can be modelled and riisks surface too late to influence outcomes.

Does any of this sound familiar? The CEO asks for a scenario and waits a week. The board gets a static pack in a dynamic market. The CFO spends more time explaining delays than shaping direction.

None of this reflects a lack of capability but what it DOES reflect is a system that’s optimised for producing numbers instead of informing decisions. What it means is that FP&A teams are still structured around yesterday’s requirements.

Historically, finance was judged on accuracy and control. Today, it’s expected to deliver speed, insight and foresight. But the underlying processes, and in many cases the technology, haven’t caught up.

Currently, teams compensate, build more complex spreadsheets and work longer hours. And gradually, a disproportionate amount of time gets absorbed by data collection and validation. In some teams, that balance has drifted to 70% data admin and 30% analysis. But when you do fix it, the shift is immediate and profound.

We’ve seen organisations reduce planning cycles from four months to six weeks using Workday Adaptive Planning. Not by changing the team, but by redesigning the process around a single source of truth, real-time visibility and controlled workflows.

And what changes isn’t just speed but the role of FP&A itself. The real question isn’t whether your planning cycle takes four month but what your team could be doing if it didn’t.

  • More scenario modelling.
  • Earlier identification of risk.
  • Deeper insight into growth drivers.
  • Stronger, more strategic conversations with leadership.

The teams getting this right haven’t necessarily become more capable overnight but they’ve stopped building their planning processes on infrastructure that was never designed for planning.

In other words: the work FP&A was always meant to do.

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