Studies show how much time planning and FP&A teams lose to data collection, validation and consolidation instead of analysis and decision support.
Excel itself is fast. A formula is quick to write, a table quick to extend and an analysis quick to build. And with AI, it will become even easier.
Excel becomes expensive where many people, files and data sources come together. That is where the work around Excel begins: finding, copying, combining, validating, reconciling and updating data. Even with AI.
The scale of this effort is illustrated by the FP&A Trends Survey 2025.
According to the survey, planning and FP&A teams that primarily use spreadsheets spend around 50% of their working time collecting and validating data. Only 28% of their time is available for generating insights and taking action.
That is remarkable. After all, the real work in planning, FP&A and corporate performance management should be to understand the numbers, identify developments and prepare decisions.
Not to copy numbers from one file to the next.
Excel is hard to beat for business and financial models. It is flexible, available almost everywhere and understood by business teams. Models can be developed and changed quickly.
The problem begins when a model becomes a business process. That introduces additional requirements:
All of this can somehow be organised with Excel. But as the number of files, people and processes grows, so does the manual effort.
Another study of CFOs estimates around ten hours of manual planning and FP&A work per week for data collection, consolidation and error correction.
Ten hours may not sound dramatic at first. Across a year and many employees, however, the picture changes. For example, with 30 employees regularly involved in such processes over 46 working weeks:
30 employees × 10 hours × 46 weeks = 13,800 working hours per year.
At an assumed fully loaded cost of €80 per hour, that would amount to approximately:
€1.1 million per year.
This is an illustrative calculation, not a figure from the study. But it shows how quickly seemingly small manual activities add up in large organisations.
The obvious conclusion might be: Excel has to go. That is often the wrong answer. The models themselves are usually not the problem. They contain a great deal of business knowledge built up over many years.
It makes more sense to retain Excel as a modelling tool and industrialise the processes around it.
Data no longer needs to be distributed and combined manually. Models can be used centrally. Users work from a shared data set. Permissions, processes and changes become traceable.
That preserves what Excel does well. And a platform takes over the part that Excel was never designed for.
Sources: FP&A Trends Survey 2025; AFP/APQC FP&A Benchmarking; CFO Budgeting and Forecasting Survey.
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