The following is a guest post from Albin Joseph, associate at Goldman Sachs. Opinions are the author’s own.
The biggest threat facing modern FP&A is not artificial intelligence.
It is the growing gap between the complexity of enterprise finance operations and the tools many organizations still rely on to manage them.
For decades, spreadsheets have been the backbone of budgeting, forecasting, reconciliations and management reporting. They remain one of the most flexible tools available to finance professionals and continue to play an important role in day-to-day analysis.
However, many organizations have quietly crossed a threshold where spreadsheet-based planning is no longer simply inefficient. It has become an operational risk.
As companies expand across legal entities, currencies, business lines and reporting requirements, finance teams are being asked to support increasingly complex planning processes. What once involved a handful of linked workbooks can evolve into dozens of interconnected files maintained by multiple stakeholders across different departments.
The challenge is not that spreadsheets are inherently flawed. The challenge is that they were never designed to serve as enterprise operating systems for finance.
Operational consequences
Throughout multiple FP&A transformation initiatives across my career, I have observed a consistent pattern. As governance requirements increase, spreadsheet dependency becomes harder to sustain. What starts as a simple forecasting or reporting process often grows into a network of files, assumptions, reconciliations and approvals that require increasing amounts of manual effort to maintain.
I learned this lesson firsthand while working on planning environments that supported multiple stakeholders and downstream reporting processes. At first, spreadsheets felt like the fastest answer because everyone understood them and changes could be made quickly. Over time, however, the flexibility that made spreadsheets useful also became their biggest weakness. Teams spent more time validating numbers, checking formulas and reconciling versions than discussing the business itself.
The operational consequences are familiar to many finance leaders. Version-control issues become recurring problems. Reconciliations require repeated manual intervention. Reporting cycles become dependent on a handful of individuals who understand how a complex workbook is structured. Business users create local workarounds to compensate for limitations in the broader planning process.
In one planning environment, incorrect values flowed through a reporting process that supported downstream stakeholders. A technical correction existed, but implementing the change carried risk because multiple dependent processes were already operating in production. Fortunately, a controlled override mechanism prevented the issue from escalating further.
That experience changed how I think about finance technology.
The lesson was not that automation solves every problem. It was that governance matters just as much as technology. A well-governed process with appropriate controls is often more valuable than a sophisticated model that lacks operational discipline.
This is one reason many finance organizations are investing in more structured planning environments. The objective is not merely to automate calculations. It is to establish clear processes around how assumptions are maintained, how changes are reviewed and how reporting outputs are governed.
Yet finance leaders should avoid treating technology as a cure-all.
The conversation around finance transformation often creates the impression that every organization needs a large-scale planning platform. In reality, the answer depends heavily on organizational complexity.
Not every company needs enterprise-connected planning.
A single-entity organization with stable operations, limited regulatory requirements and relatively straightforward planning processes may be better served by disciplined spreadsheet practices than by an expensive technology implementation. Strong controls, clear ownership, standardized templates, Power Query and documented governance can often provide meaningful benefits without introducing additional complexity.
I have also seen situations where organizations spent significant time addressing integration challenges that never existed when planning activities were managed through spreadsheets. Technology can solve certain problems while simultaneously creating new ones.
The question should never be whether spreadsheets are good or bad.
The question is whether the planning environment matches the complexity of the business.
Importance of AI governance
Artificial intelligence adds another dimension to this discussion. Many finance professionals worry that AI will eventually replace planning and analysis roles. I believe that concern misses the bigger issue.
AI is already capable of summarizing reports, identifying anomalies and accelerating certain administrative activities. These capabilities will continue to improve.
However, finance organizations still require people to define business logic, evaluate assumptions, oversee controls, manage governance processes and take accountability for decisions. Those responsibilities cannot simply be delegated to an algorithm.
In fact, the increasing use of AI may make governance even more important. Faster insights are only valuable if the underlying data, assumptions and reporting structures remain trustworthy.
The future of FP&A will not be determined by whether organizations adopt AI. It will be determined by whether finance teams can build operating models that scale with business complexity while maintaining control, transparency and accountability.
Spreadsheets will remain part of finance for many years to come. They are not disappearing.
But organizations that continue treating spreadsheets as the primary infrastructure for increasingly complex planning environments may eventually discover that the cost of maintaining those processes exceeds the cost of modernizing them.
