It’s a question many finance leaders are asking themselves today. “Why can’t my finance team spend more time on strategic work and less time on reporting?” The answer has long been thought to be the tedious nature of reporting and manual operation of dashboards. Now, as automation tools and AI-enabled dashboards are implemented across accounting and finance departments, leaders are realizing that the time-consuming tasks of reporting might not be what’s holding back their teams from delivering on strategy. They would be right – there’s a critical skill that most accounting and finance professionals are missing that would help them grow into more strategic, analytical, and advisory roles. The answer is data analytics and storytelling.
Today’s teams are not meeting expectations
According to a 2025 report from Yooz, 44% of business leaders expect finance teams to spend most of their time on strategic work. It’s clear that organizations want to see these departments transition from being number crunchers to decision-makers and strategists. In Deloitte’s Q4 2025 CFO Signals survey, nearly half of CFOs said their top talent priority for 2026 was automating processes to free up employees for higher-value work.
But for advanced technology to solve this time dilemma, accounting and finance teams need to know how to use data analytics tools responsibly and strategically. The workforce is still catching up. Digital talent makes up less than 20% of finance teams today, yet CFOs expect one in two finance employees to be digital talent by 2027, according to research from Gartner.
While leaders see these tools as an opportunity to improve operational efficiency, accounting and finance teams are skeptical of their benefits. Global accountants indicated concerns around the use of AI tools, including the pace of adoption, quality of output, and the erosion of trust in data and decision-making that it’s causing, in the Global Economic Conditions Survey (GECS) Report: Q1, 2026, an assessment from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
A dilemma is unfolding – leaders want automation to free up time for strategy, but teams are lacking the skills to both implement this automation and interpret the data to tell a complete story.
Finance teams need to tell a data story
Accounting and finance teams need the capabilities to work with AI-automated data dashboards and projections and create and fine-tune models and forecasts, while making sure the data is accurate and reliable. On top of these technical skills, they also need the strategic thinking and analytical reasoning to piece together the story behind the numbers and be able to convey it in a way that resonates with their audience, whether that’s executive leadership, board members, or investors. It’s one thing to say, “Sales fell by 4% last quarter.” But all that tells an investor is that sales went down. Was it due to market dynamics? Did prices go up? This is the type of critical context that accounting and finance teams need to be able to pair with data-driven insights to tell a business story that organizations can act upon.
To truly go beyond the numbers and provide strategic analysis, accounting and finance teams must be able to:
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Transform raw data into actionable financial insights
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Create decision-oriented visualizations for their specific audiences
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Develop storytelling skills to communicate complex analysis to senior leadership
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Apply sensitivity analysis, probability simulations, and optimization models
Transform your team into storytellers
With organizations expecting more strategic, analytical thinking from their accounting and finance teams, building data storytelling skills will need to be a priority in the near-term. And many leaders are on board – a quarter of organizations ranked developing talent and skills within their team as a top-three priority in 2026, according to the Technology and Finance at the Crossroads report from IMA and the CFO Alliance. What often causes the holdup is the lack of training programs that go beyond surface-level learning to building practical skills that can be applied immediately.
That’s why IMA created the Advanced Data Analytics Micro-credential, built by industry experts specifically for accounting and finance applications. The courses within the micro-credential help teams learn how to effectively leverage the latest automation tools and AI technologies; translate the output into specific, actionable insights; and tell compelling data stories – so that teams can deliver even more value for their organization. Learn more at https://www.imaglobal.org/pages/analytics-micro
