Key takeaways:
Market conditions can shift faster than a quarterly planning cycle. A new tariff, a competitor move, a sudden change in demand mean that finance teams need answers now, not at the end of the month. Yet for most FP&A teams, scenario planning and “what-if" analysis remain a struggle.
According to a January 2026 Forrester Opportunity Snapshot commissioned by Anaplan, 64% of finance decision-makers say that scenario planning and “what-if” analysis are very or extremely challenging at their organization. That's nearly two-thirds of finance leaders who can't easily do something that should be core to the job.
What's getting in the way?
Why is scenario planning so difficult for most FP&A teams?
When consolidated actuals live in one system, operational data in another, and forecasts in a third, scenario modeling requires manually stitching together information that should never have been separated in the first place.
Fragmented systems block the full picture
Effective scenario planning depends on live connections to demand forecasts, workforce plans, sales pipelines, and operational data. When those inputs are siloed, your financial drivers remain static or out of sync, and your scenarios are only ever partial.
The Forrester study found that 85% of finance organizations use different, specialized platforms for financial consolidation and financial planning. Finance professionals toggle between an average of 4.6 distinct systems to complete critical planning, consolidation, and reporting processes, and it still takes an average of 6.7 business days to close the books and issue consolidated financial statements.
Stale data, stale scenarios
Without a connected process that links consolidated actuals directly to planning, finance teams can't react to shifting trends in real-time and immediately update the forecast. By the time a scenario can be modeled, it may already be out of date.
The gaps go deeper than most teams realize. According to Anaplan's broader research, 41% of finance decision-makers say that analyzing data at a granular, operational level is extremely challenging, and 41% say the same about integrating and reconciling data across multiple systems.
As a result, finance teams struggle to produce scenarios that anyone fully trusts. And when finance can't trust its own numbers, its ability to influence business decisions on things such as capital allocation, resource deployment, and strategic investment become fundamentally compromised.
A compounding problem
Slow financial consolidation doesn't just delay reporting; it also delays everything downstream. Scenario planning depends on reliable consolidated actuals as its baseline. When those actuals take nearly 7 business days to produce, finance teams are always modeling against stale numbers.
The tools themselves compound the problem. Nearly 40% of respondents cited poor user experience as a top challenge with their current technology, and only 53% said they could configure their FP&A or consolidation software to meet their needs without involving IT.
For teams that need to move quickly, dependence on technical resources to make routine adjustments is a significant constraint. It also means that too much of the FP&A team's time is spent on data wrangling and system administration rather than the high-value analytical work that shapes strategy.
What does a good scenario planning capability look like in practice?
Finance teams that can model scenarios effectively work from a single, connected data model, can run real-time “what-if” analysis without waiting on IT or manual data preparation, and can leverage AI-driven recommendations with full auditability.
Navigate market uncertainty with confidence
Finance leaders know exactly what they need. Among their top priorities for 2026 are AI adoption, enterprise-wide planning, and enhanced scenario modeling agility. Finance organizations want to stop reacting, start proactively anticipating outcomes with AI-driven predictive intelligence, and acting on risks and opportunities before they hit performance.
This is precisely the problem Anaplan is designed to solve. The platform connects financial and operational planning across finance, sales, HR, and supply chain, creating a single source of truth that gives every team the same reliable, real-time view of the business. When consolidated actuals feed directly into the planning environment, the lag between close and forecast disappears.
Anaplan's real-time calculation engine means “what-if” scenarios run instantly, without manual data pulls or overnight processing. Finance teams can test decisions before committing. They can model multiple outcomes simultaneously and compare them against a unified baseline.
With cross-functional data unified in one model, finance can evaluate trade-offs across the business with confidence, not guesswork. What’s more, every recommendation comes with full data lineage, allowing finance leaders to defend their scenarios to the CFO, the board, or the audit committee.
Turn finance into a strategic driver
With Anaplan, finance teams work within a finance-owned and no-code environment. Teams can build and modify models without relying on IT to make changes — a meaningful shift from the 47% of finance leaders who currently can't do this on their own.
That autonomy gives finance teams the modeling depth to identify better paths to resource allocation and investment — surfacing the trade-offs that matter before decisions get made, not after. This also supports FP&A professionals to spend more time conducting strategic, forward-looking analysis that elevates their impact on the organization and drives better decisions.
For finance teams under pressure to do more than report on the past, the path forward is an integrated planning platform where consolidated actuals feed directly into forecasting, AI surfaces insights with context, and scenario analysis is a daily capability rather than a periodic event.
