One of the finance department’s most important roles is to act as a partner to the rest of the business, contributing to the strategic goals and insights that help organizations thrive.
FP&A is a particularly important strategic partner, handling core processes like budgeting, forecasting and scenario analysis to help the rest of the business plan, look forward and better understand where the company is going.
But along the way, there’s a lot of low-value work that FP&A teams find themselves tasked with as well. And those jobs, often time-consuming in their own right, can take away from the more high-value efforts.
For instance:
Data gathering
Data gathering and data manipulation can take up a lot of finance teams’ time. In fact, FP&A employees today spend a full 75% of their time gathering data. “The key part is getting the right data, accurate data,” says Domenic Colangelo, Manager of FP&A at Vena Solutions. “Then you end up having to spend a lot of time just manipulating it so you can work with it, or combining data sets because they are related to each other.”
Being able to move straight to the insights without having to do all that data gathering or manipulation would be a time saver, he adds. And any tools or processes that help teams resolve those data issues, automate their data processes and help them ensure data accuracy and accessibility can ultimately save time.
Ad hoc reporting
As the keepers of much of their organization’s performance data, FP&A teams are often approached with ad hoc requests for reports that take them away from their day-to-day jobs.
They can spend days digging through the data for the information they need as they put together reports to provide to executives, department heads, board members or other stakeholders.
These reports ultimately help those stakeholders apply data to their decision-making and move the business forward more strategically. But, the effort it takes to produce them on short notice can also negatively impact finance productivity, taking away from FP&A’s already long list of priorities.
Searching for information
In addition to those ad hoc reporting requests, finance teams often find themselves digging into data to find answers to questions from across the organization, or looking for the information they need to build out their financial analysis or planning.
But often those answers can be difficult to find, spread across multiple source systems and often formatted in ways that are unorganized or inconsistent. And in a business environment that changes so quickly, this does more than waste finance teams’ time. It slows down the entire organization and makes it harder to make real-time decisions and maintain a competitive edge.
How generative AI can help
AI’s ability to dig through vast amounts of data quickly and analyze it in real-time makes it particularly ideal for finance teams and the large datasets they deal with.
Being able to interrogate your data in real-time through natural language with generative AI can help your FP&A team stay more agile. This also means your team becomes more productive, by:
- Answering stakeholder questions faster (or taking this task off your plate entirely by enabling stakeholders across the business to ask questions to the chat assistant themselves)
- Producing ad-hoc reports more easily
- Quickly identifying trends or anomalies
- Sorting through and analyzing data faster
“I think AI can help us tweak assumptions and give us a start on those inputs to our planning and modeling,” Domenic adds. “And by doing so, it can enable finance teams to get to the high-value analysis quicker.”
While AI can’t (and shouldn’t) replace finance teams for those higher-value roles, by taking on the lower-value tasks it gives you more time to spend on analysis and strategy. And in doing so, AI empowers the entire organization to meet its goals and stay on top of market changes.
Maximizing your finance team’s potential
In the current business environment, the demands on FP&A teams are only growing, as more areas of the company require their strategic input. But as finance teams’ resources aren’t growing to match, they’ll need to create that capacity in other ways.
Generative AI can help them do just that.
AI has the power to drastically improve finance productivity and take on many of the low-value tasks FP&A teams are often saddled with. This ultimately frees up your time to play a more strategic role across your whole business and enables the kind of decision-making that drives higher profitability.
Looking to learn more about how generative AI can help your finance team unlock productivity and unleash its strategic potential? Explore Vena Copilot.
