Imagine a ship where the crew steering the rudder (operations) has a different map than the person navigating the route (FP&A), while the captain logging the journey (accounting) is using a separate, outdated logbook. This is what happens when organizations manage their financial, operational, and accounting processes in separate silos. The accounting team works tirelessly to close the books, while the FP&A team waits for the final numbers to begin their analysis, and operational teams march forward with their own distinct plans.
This disconnect creates a significant and dangerous gap between your strategic financial targets, your reported actuals, and the day-to-day operational realities. To build a truly resilient enterprise — one that can anticipate and adapt to market shifts with agility — you need a unified platform that connects every part of the business; from strategy and planning, to execution and financial consolidation.
Creating a single, connected source of truth
The first signs of business trouble — or unexpected opportunity — often appear in operational metrics long before they ever hit the final income statement. Think of a sudden drop in daily sales in a key region, a spike in raw materials costs, or an increase in customer support tickets.
As highlighted in our white paper, "How a Complete CPM Solution Boosts Enterprise Resilience and Fuels Finance Leadership," produced by BPM Partners in coordination with Anaplan, a unified framework provides "connected financial and operational signaling," allowing your business to see these trends and react to them in real time.
Finance leaders overwhelmingly recognize the critical need for this alignment. In the 2025 BPM Pulse Survey, an impressive 92% of respondents said that integrating operational plans with financial results planning is important or very important. This strategic approach ensures that budgets and forecasts are continuously informed by what’s actually happening on the ground. For accounting teams, it means the numbers they work to consolidate and report are part of a single, coherent story that aligns with the rest of the business, reducing discrepancies and last-minute fire drills.
Achieving confident, data-driven decisions
A disconnected planning and consolidation process creates friction, delays, and a lack of confidence in the numbers for everyone involved.
The challenges of a siloed finance function:
- For accounting: The month-end cycle becomes a stressful, manual exercise in data wrangling and reconciliation between systems, delaying the delivery of consolidated actuals.
- For FP&A: The team is forced to wait on accounting, shortening their analysis window and often relying on stale data to build forecasts and explain variances.
- For the business: A lack of trust in the numbers grows, as different departments present conflicting data, undermining collaborative decision-making.
When you unify your financial processes and data onto a single platform, you create a powerful, continuous feedback loop that benefits the entire organization.
The advantages of a unified finance solution:
- For accounting: The financial consolidation process is streamlined and automated. The 2025 BPM Pulse Survey found that with a modern system, 61% of organizations achieve a faster consolidation and close, freeing the team to focus on high-value analysis rather than manual tasks.
- For FP&A: Teams gain immediate access to real-time actuals as they are available, allowing for continuous, rolling forecasts and deeper predictive variance analysis.
- For the business: With 85% of survey respondents agreeing that integrating all performance management elements in one solution is important, a unified platform becomes the undisputed source of truth, creating alignment from the C-suite to front-line managers.
This is the foundation of a modern, resilient finance function, where accounting, FP&A, and operations work in concert. It’s the key to transforming your financial processes from a series of static, disconnected exercises into an agile and strategic capability that builds a durable, competitive advantage.
