FP&A teams have a perception problem. Only 31% of finance professionals surveyed in Vena’s 2026 FP&A Impact Report said leadership views their FP&A function as a strategic business partner, while just 9% said their teams are seen as critical drivers of growth. By comparison, 47% say they’re viewed as “reliable advisors on financials” and 14% say their sole purpose is as a “transactional reporting function.
That perception is largely an operating model problem. When Finance spends much of its time assembling data and enters business decisions after assumptions have already taken shape, leaders experience FP&A as a reporting function rather than a strategic partner.
Fixing this problem involves more than just delivering data faster. FP&A teams need to break out of their silos and make cross-functional collaboration core to how they operate. That requires freeing up capacity to connect financial results with business realities and guide better decisions.
What’s Behind the FP&A Perception Gap
While 67% of the financial professionals surveyed rate their own FP&A team’s influence on the rest of the business as “high” or “very high,” it’s clear from the data above that there’s still a disconnect in how the rest of the business actually views their contributions.
At their core, Finance teams still spend too much time assembling the numbers before they can interpret them. In fact, more than half (58%) of respondents pointed to data quality and availability as a current bottleneck impeding their FP&A function. When teams burn energy reconciling spreadsheets, they have less time to analyze tradeoffs, challenge assumptions and advise the business.
FP&A teams are also often brought into operational conversations too late. 43% of finance teams cited limited alignment with other business units as a major bottleneck. Without timely operating context, Finance is missing a critical part of the picture when interpreting performance. At the same time, without FP&A helping translate financial results into their implications for the business, functional leaders may be left to make decisions based more on intuition than a shared understanding of the numbers.
Strong cross-functional partnerships give Finance the context it needs to deliver better analysis and gives the broader business the financial perspective it needs to make more informed decisions.
Moving Beyond the Financial Gatekeeper Role and Into Strategic Partnerships
Organizations should treat the budget, forecast and operating plan as shared business commitments, not documents owned exclusively by Finance. FP&A’s role is to identify the most relevant business drivers, clarify financial outcomes and ensure decisions are connected to enterprise goals. This shifts Finance from simply controlling the planning process to orchestrating how the organization creates and acts on the plan.
FP&A leaders should also build recurring partnerships with sales, marketing, HR, IT and operations outside formal budget season. Ongoing collaboration gives Finance earlier visibility into emerging risks, planned investments and operating changes before their effects appear in reported results. The goal is not for Finance to own every decision. It’s to make the financial and strategic consequences visible at the point of decision.
When operational leaders and finance teams share assumptions and targets, the organization can respond as one business rather than as a collection of departments.
Confidence Starts with Connected Data
Leaders hesitate most when teams are working from different numbers, definitions or assumptions. This is compounded by the fact that 51% of respondents report only moderate or limited integration between FP&A tools and their source systems. Trusted data reduces the time spent validating what is true and increases the time available to determine what to do next. By connecting operational activity to financial impact, FP&A can identify problems earlier and model the consequences of different responses.
This distinction is especially clear when comparing teams at different maturity levels. Among respondents who rated their FP&A maturity as “Leading,” 49% said their team’s primary role is “driving business insights and influencing decisions.” By contrast, 48% of respondents who rated their FP&A maturity as “Basic” said their team’s primary role is “forecasting and variance analysis.”
That difference underscores what FP&A maturity looks like in practice: moving beyond producing and explaining the numbers to actively shaping the decisions that follow. The true expression of FP&A maturity is not simply faster production of financial information. It is the ability to connect that information to business outcomes and decisions.
Better integration and automation can reduce manual work, but systems cannot resolve unclear ownership, competing incentives or weak communication. FP&A professionals still need trusted relationships with functional leaders who can explain what is changing on the ground.
AI also raises the stakes for trust and alignment. AI may accelerate reporting, analysis and scenario generation, but it will not resolve inconsistent data or misaligned business definitions. Without a trusted foundation, organizations risk producing analysis faster without improving the quality of the decisions that follow.
FP&A has an opportunity to lead the transition by ensuring AI-supported decisions remain governed, explainable and grounded in business reality.
FP&A’s Reputation Changes When Workflows Do
FP&A teams cannot persuade the business that they are strategic while remaining structurally trapped in reactive reporting and data wrangling. Strategic influence develops when Finance creates a trusted view of performance, enters business conversations earlier and remains involved as decisions move into execution.
FP&A will solve its perception problem not by telling the business it deserves a more strategic role, but by building the trusted data flows, relationships and operating rhythm that make that role impossible to overlook.
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Bio:
As Chief Financial Officer at Vena, Melissa Howatson oversees the strategic direction and operational performance of the finance organization, including financial reporting, planning, controllership and procurement. A chartered accountant with deep experience helping high-growth companies scale, she previously served as CFO of D2L, where she led the company through its IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Melissa is known for her strategic thinking, collaborative leadership and focus on developing teams while driving strong business results. She graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University and earned her CPA-CA designation at KPMG. Outside of work, she spends time with her husband and three children and volunteers with organizations focused on education and improving outcomes for families and children.
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