If you read CFO.com’s recent article titled 7 finance trends CFOs can’t ignore in 2026, two items jump off the page for financial controllership: certified professional accountant (CPA) licensure reforms are changing the accounting talent pipeline, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A), especially private equity (PE), “aren’t slowing down anytime soon.”
Those trends sound separate until they land in your lap at the same time.
More entities, more integrations, more reporting expectations, plus a wider mix of early-career experience across the team. That is how audit readiness gets tested in your day-to-day financial consolidation and reporting work.
Why these two trends collide in controllership
If you’re not already familiar with the CPA licensure change, here’s the scoop: aspiring accountants can now take advantage of two pathways to obtain their CPA. Candidates can still follow the traditional route that centers on the 150-hour education requirement, as well as a new pathway of 120 credit hours (a bachelor’s-level track) paired with additional supervised experience. These changes, enacted by AICPA and NASBA, appear to be a welcome change as many U.S. states have already begun to revise and adopt the new standards.
On the talent side, CFO.com quotes the CEO of the New York State Society of CPAs, Calvin Harris Jr., on what stays constant: “In the end, both pathways lead to the same credential…The CPA itself remains the differentiator.”
The financial controllership takeaway is not that standards are slipping. It’s about variance. When educational backgrounds and work readiness vary more widely in your talent pool, consistency with your processes and strict compliance are more important than ever.
In addition to the licensure changes, deal velocity is rising due to a mix of market conditions and renewed appetite for these types of transactions. The Economist noted this rapid deal expansion occurring in the third quarter of 2025, so it’s no surprise that Steven Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, states to CFO.com that, “On the M&A side, it’s been largely quiet industrywide for the past three years.” Yet there are, “several positive forces that could drive deal activity pretty high in 2026.”
If deals continue to speed up, your business could be next on the list to inherit new entities, new account structures, new controls owners, and new consolidation requirements. Put those two trends together and you get the real 2026 controllership tension: audit-ready outcomes with less slack and more change.
What breaks first when capacity tightens
When deal work stacks on top of period-end responsibilities and fresh talent, the cracks tend to show up in familiar places:
- Reconciliations age and exceptions linger
- Review bottlenecks form around a few senior “keepers of context”
- Support and approvals get scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets
- Late journals increase, followed by post-period adjustments
- Controls drift during transition months as ownership shifts
This is where audit readiness starts to feel fragile, even when everyone is working hard.
A financial controller playbook for staying audit-ready during deal velocity
1) Lock in the “must-do” month-end tasks
When you’re integrating new entities, you can’t treat every task like it has the same priority.
Start by writing down the consolidation and reporting steps that cannot slip without creating audit risk, like high-risk reconciliations, key approvals, and required evidence. Treat those as non-negotiable.
Then, for everything else, make a simple call each month:
- Do it now (it affects accuracy, controls, or audit evidence)
- Do it later (it matters, but it is not high-risk this period)
- Don’t do it (it’s low value, or it can be paused during integration)
Most importantly, if something is deferred, document who approved it and what will happen next month, so the team doesn’t resort to informal, offline shortcuts that are hard to explain in an audit.
2) Standardize reconciliations and journal entry governance
When the talent pipeline broadens and deal activity adds complexity, consistency has to come from your operating rhythm.
Enforce standardized reconciliation templates, substantiation expectations, and sign-off rules across entities within a single platform. This allows you to keep reviews focused on exceptions and risk, not on rechecking every low-variance account the same way every month.
3) Build review capacity
If a handful of people are the only “safe reviewers,” audit readiness will bottleneck the moment you add entities.
Separate prep from review wherever possible by leveraging automated workflows that route tasks and provide clear checklists for each step. This codifies reviewer checklists and builds a training ladder so newer hires can contribute safely and predictably. This is the practical implication of what CFO.com’s related reporting emphasizes around maintaining consistency in supervision, training, and audit readiness as CPA pathways expand.
4) Centralize evidence so audit readiness is the default
Audit friction is often evidence friction.
Create a single source of truth by centralizing supporting documentation, approvals, and policy references so your financial consolidation process produces an audit-friendly trail by default. Standard naming conventions and retention rules feel small, but they eliminate the scavenger hunt that drains controller capacity.
5) Treat integration as a controllership workstream
Controllers reduce integration risk when accounting integration has defined outcomes, not vague intent.
Start with day 1 essentials (entity structure, chart of accounts mapping, policy alignment, and bringing the entity into the consolidation calendar). Then set 30/60/90-day milestones with a clear “done” definition tied to repeatability and evidence discipline.
The financial controller takeaway for 2026
With the CPA pathway evolving and M&A activity continuing to increase, there’s no better time to prepare than now. You can’t control these trends, but you can control whether your financial consolidation software and staff are prepared to handle the incoming complexity.
Anaplan’s ready-to-deploy, no code Financial Consolidation application with intuitive user-interface (UX) is your best weapon to manage the surge in new entities, tighter reporting demands, and added audit scrutiny that comes with rapid change.
