The frustrating part about financial planning isn’t the repetition; it’s that the business keeps changing while the forecast is still in motion.
You already know the pressures: demand shifts, cost variability, hiring constraints, pricing decisions, and more. But what really slows finance teams down is the need to respond to rapid change with more precision: modeling multiple complex scenarios, testing sensitivities across detailed drivers, and updating leadership with confidence. When your planning environment can’t handle that complexity, or can’t do it quickly, finance is forced into workarounds that stretch cycles and limit agility.
If your technology and processes are built in a way that creates delay at every step, that means your inputs arrive late, assumptions conflict, and the work required to validate the financial forecast becomes its own project.
1. Inputs arrive late — and in formats you can’t use quickly
Planning starts with a scramble for data. Even when your actuals are finalized, finance still has to pull inputs from multiple systems and teams: enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), human capital management (HCM), and operational sources.
The problem isn’t access. It’s readiness. Each dataset arrives with different structures, definitions, and timing. Finance burns days cleaning, mapping, and reconciling before analysis even begins. The cycle stretches before the forecast has a chance to move.
2. Assumptions conflict because teams plan in different languages
Most organizations can set a target. The slowdown happens when you try to align the drivers behind it.
Sales talks pipeline, conversion, and ramp, while operations focuses on capacity and volume, human resources (HR) focuses on hiring and attrition, and finance focuses on cost, margin, and cash.
These are all valid perspectives, but when the assumptions live across disconnected files, it becomes hard to answer basic questions quickly:
- Which assumptions are current?
- Which drivers changed?
- Which plan is the one we’re using?
Misalignment forces extra review cycles, more reconciliation, and repeated rebuilds.
3. Scenario analysis turns into a manual side project
In a volatile market, leadership doesn’t just want one forecast. They want options.
What happens if hiring slips? If demand softens? If pricing changes? If supply constraints hit a region or product line?
When scenario work requires copying models, changing assumptions by hand, and rebuilding outputs, it becomes a separate project layered on top of planning. Finance devotes all their time attempting to produce multiple scenarios instead of using them to inform stakeholders and guide decisions.
4. Review cycles create rework because changes don’t flow smoothly
Every planning cycle has reviews. The issue is when every review creates rework.
Stakeholders request changes. Finance updates the model. Then the same updates have to be reflected across linked worksheets, charts, variance bridges, and summary files. Small changes turn into cascading effort — and each iteration adds time, risk, and fatigue.
When change doesn’t propagate through a governed process, reviews stop accelerating alignment and start extending the cycle.
5. The forecast is “done,” but the outputs aren’t ready for leadership
Even after you align on the numbers, your planning still isn’t finished. You still need the pack: executive summaries, variance explanations, commentary, and visuals that communicate decisions and tradeoffs.
If those deliverables are built in disconnected spreadsheets and presentations, they become fragile. A late update forces last-minute edits and revalidation across multiple files, which slows the final stretch and undermines confidence in the story you’re presenting.
How to remove these 5 blockers without slowing down
The fastest FP&A teams don’t move faster because they work longer hours. They move fast because they’ve removed the five sources causing delay.
A connected approach helps your finance team:
- Accelerate inputs by reducing manual prep and reconciliation
- Align assumptions through a governed driver structure shared across teams
- Scale “what-if” analysis so scenarios don’t require copying models and rebuilding logic
- Reduce rework in reviews by letting updates flow through the plan consistently
- Speed executive-ready outputs by keeping planning deliverables tied to trusted data
With Anaplan for Finance, you align financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analysis with financial consolidation and reporting through a single, governed environment that can keep up with volatility. Because the model, drivers, and outputs stay connected, teams can pivot faster when assumptions change, align stakeholders on one set of numbers, and turn scenario work into a repeatable workflow instead of a manual side project.
And with Anaplan Intelligence, finance teams move even faster. Intelligent, role-based AI agents help you accelerate your model building, uncover drivers behind changes, and answer business questions in context, so you can explore more scenarios, test sensitivities across granular drivers, and update leadership with confidence without extending the cycle every time the business shifts.
With Anaplan, your team removes these blockers so financial planning stops being a weeks-long cycle of validation and rebuilds and instead becomes a faster, more confident process leaders can act on.
