Five essential OpEx metrics every finance team should monitor

It’s not the headline-grabbing investments that usually bust your budget; it’s the slow drip of operational expenses (OpEx) that quietly stack up across functions, departments, and systems. 

For finance leaders, understanding OpEx isn’t just about reporting on spend. It’s the heartbeat of daily business execution — and how well it's managed can affect your profitability. Given greater market uncertainty, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) forces orgs to justify every dollar of operating expense, promoting strict cost discipline, transparency and alignment with strategic priorities. This encourages accountability and ongoing cost efficiency across the business. While revenue fuels growth, it's disciplined control of OpEx that ensures sustainable margins, operational efficiency, and agility to respond to market changes. Especially in uncertain times, finance leaders must move beyond cost-cutting measures and focus on optimizing OpEx to unlock value, drive productivity, and support strategic objectives. By tracking the right metrics, organizations gain visibility into spending patterns, uncover inefficiencies, and make data-driven decisions that balance performance with cost discipline. And that takes more than a spreadsheet. 

Below, we explore five essential OpEx metrics and how Anaplan helps you manage them with confidence.

1. Cost per full-time equivalent (FTE)

What it is and why it matters: The cost per FTE metric indicates how efficiently you spend to support each team member. Since labor is often your largest operational expense, understanding cost per FTE helps your finance team assess workforce productivity, guide strategic headcount decisions, and align capacity with demand. When this metric fluctuates, it often signals deeper issues in resource allocation, organizational design, or cost containment.

Consider a biotech firm that benchmarks its cost per FTE against industry peers and uncovers a 10% gap — this often triggers a reassessment of its shared services model to better understand overhead requirements.

Anaplan allows you to plan these types of OpEx with ease, connecting your entire organization so that you can dynamically model and update cost per FTE as your headcount, compensation, or location assumptions shift. With Anaplan, finance and HR teams effortlessly align hiring plans to business demand and budget constraints.

2. Fixed versus variable OpEx

What it is and why it matters: Categorizing OpEx as fixed or variable helps you understand your business’ cost structure flexibility, and which levers need to be pulled in different scenarios. In times of uncertainty, this distinction becomes essential. This ratio shows how much of your OpEx is fixed (unchanging regardless of volume or units) versus variable (change according to activity levels). Having a high fixed-cost base can limit an organization's flexibility during downturns, so having a balanced mix allows for more agile responses to market conditions.

For instance, a retailer with a high fixed lease may need to adjust fixed OpEx during a period of low consumer spend.

With Anaplan’s driver-based planning, your team can effortlessly model how changes in business activity affect variable and fixed expenses. Our scenario modeling helps you stress test plans, simulate shifts in cost drivers, and determine the financial impact in real time.

3. OpEx by business driver or cost center

What it is and why it matters: Tracking expenses by business driver or cost center helps reveal the effectiveness of your organization’s spending and its alignment with strategic priorities. This metric is important for actionable insight and accountability as it breaks down OpEx by specific operational drivers (such as sales and customer support) or cost centers (such as business units and regions). This more granular visibility into where money is spent supports cost accountability and helps isolate inefficiencies or overspending in certain areas.

For example, if a consumer goods company allocates OpEx by regional cost centers and realizes Europe marketing spend is 30% higher than North America, this would cause a review of current vendors and reallocation of budget from underperforming regions.

Anaplan makes this level of visibility possible with pre-built integrations to your ERP or GL systems and a centralized data hub powered by Anaplan Data Orchestrator. Your team can easily slice data by product, function, region, or initiative and instantly share insights with stakeholders across the business.

4. Forecast accuracy

What it is and why it matters: Forecast accuracy measures the difference (actual number or percentage) between forecasted OpEX and the original plan or actual spending over a given period. High accuracy reflects a solid cost structure and effective planning, building confidence with good cash flow, margin, and resource planning. When forecasts miss the mark, decisions suffer — and so does your team’s credibility. Finance needs to close the gap between plans and reality, fast.

With Anaplan, your actuals flow in automatically and continuously update your forecasts without manual data uploads. Our solution flags unexpected variances and uncovers trends through advanced machine learning, helping our customers course-correct quickly and experience up to 20% faster forecasting ability.

5. OpEx coverage ratio

What it is and why it matters: OpEx coverage ratio tells you how much of your organization's recurring revenue or operation income is generated to cover its cost base. A ratio above 1.0 translates to sustainable operations as income exceeds expenses. Ratio below 1.0 indicates a company may need external funding or other financial sources to remain viable. For high-growth or cost-conscious companies, OpEx coverage ratio is a vital metric. It reflects your financial health, operational resilience, and risk.

Take a manufacturing company with an OpEx coverage ratio of 0.8 — this means 20% of its operating expenses must be funded by sources outside of operating income to keep operations running.

Anaplan enables real-time visibility into cash position, burn rate, and operating expenses across the business. Instead of relying on static spreadsheets, your team can plan for multiple scenarios and visualize how cost changes, tariffs, revenue shifts, or investment decisions impact your coverage ratio. Our quick “what-if” scenario modeling and analysis supports confident, data-driven choices across the office of finance.

Turn insight into action with Anaplan

Monitoring metrics is only the beginning. The real advantage comes from acting on insight the moment it surfaces. That’s where the Anaplan Integrated Financial Planning (IFP) application comes in.

Our IFP application brings your financial planning into a unified, real-time model that connects directly with your ERP/GL, enabling consistent, trusted data across all cost centers. Best-practice templates, configurable dashboards, and detailed reports come out-of-the-box to quicken your implementation— reducing planning cycle times and accelerating adoption across your team. 

With our predictive analytics and “what-if” scenario modeling, we help your team simulate future states and plan proactively instead of reactively. Need to model the impact of inflation, hiring freezes, or supply chain delays? With our multi-dimensional engine, you can create, compare, and pivot between scenarios in real time — without relying on IT or chasing data across silos. Our newest feature includes our conversational AI agent, Anaplan CoPlanner, acting as your virtual financial analyst to help surface hidden drivers, analyze patterns, and uncover risk factors in seconds. 

With the right insights at your fingertips, your finance team can move from reactive to strategic. Start transforming your OpEx planning today and turn every dollar into a smarter decision.