The 2025 AFP FP&A Benchmarking Survey Report: Technology & Data examines how FP&A can better deliver on its mission of providing actionable intelligence by utilizing technology to better enable fast decision-making and analytical insight.

Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals identify bad data — more often than people skills or tools — as the primary hindrance to their technology success. Sixty-one percent of respondents stated it was the lack of data reliability that posed a challenge, while 60% reported it was the lack of accessible data that held them back.

Other survey highlights:

• Spreadsheets remain the dominant tool for FP&A professionals, with 96% of survey respondents using them for planning, 93% using them for reporting purposes on a daily or weekly basis.
• To overcome the challenges of unreliable data, more than half of survey respondents report using at least 8 categories of planning tools and 10 types of reporting tools on a quarterly basis.
• Enterprise performance management (EPM) tools, intended to minimize the problem of data being neither reliable nor accessible, are broadly applied across FP&A.
• Seventy-one percent of respondents use EPM tools at least quarterly, however, the high use of spreadsheets indicates that EPMs are not fully successful in reaching their intended purpose of dealing with unreliable data.
• The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in FP&A has not reached a level of commonality, with just 23% of survey respondents using it on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. That said, 40% of survey respondents are in the testing phase and plan to implement AI in the next year.
• For 83% of respondents, technology and data skills are on par with finance skills with it comes to desirability.

This survey generated 362 responses from FP&A practitioners from around the world.

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Press Inquiries:

Press Release: Survey: Lack of Reliable and Accessible Data Holds FP&A Back From Success with Technology

If you are interested in referencing data from this report in marketing materials, etc. please contact Anissa Holm, Research Manager. 

Contact [email protected] or call 301.907.2862 for more in-depth information, to read the full report or to arrange an interview with AFP Research.

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Questions about this subject?

Contact Bryan Lapidus, AFP's Director of FP&A.