Why Your FP&A Process Is Broken — And How EPM Fixes It | Keansa

Most finance leaders already know their FP&A process isn't working as well as it should. The symptoms are familiar: budget cycles that drag on for months, forecast updates that take two weeks to prepare, and a finance team that spends most of its time chasing data instead of analysing it. But knowing something is broken and understanding why are two different things.

The 70/30 Problem

Here's a statistic that resonates with almost every finance leader we work with: most FP&A teams spend roughly 70% of their time collecting, cleaning, and reconciling data — and only 30% on actual analysis and decision support.

That ratio should be reversed.

When the majority of a finance team's bandwidth goes into data wrangling, the business loses out on what finance is actually supposed to deliver: insight, challenge, and forward-looking guidance. The CFO ends up presenting a view of the past instead of shaping the future. The 70/30 problem isn't a people problem. It's a process and tools problem.

Five Signs Your FP&A Process Is Broken

1. Your Budget Cycle Takes More Than 8 Weeks

If your annual budget process runs for three, four, or even six months — with multiple rounds of consolidation, version control issues, and last-minute re-submissions — you're not running a budget process. You're running a project. Best-in-class FP&A teams complete their budget cycle in four to six weeks. The difference is almost always the planning infrastructure.

2. You're Running Multiple Versions of the Truth

"Which number is right — the one in the board pack or the one finance sent last week?" If that question sounds familiar, you have a single-source-of-truth problem. When planning data lives across dozens of spreadsheets, SharePoint folders, and email threads, inconsistency is inevitable. Decisions get made on stale or incorrect numbers, and finance spends hours reconciling before every leadership meeting.

3. Your Forecasts Are Reactive, Not Predictive

Most FP&A teams produce a rolling forecast — but if that forecast is largely a copy of last month's actuals with minor adjustments, it's not really a forecast. It's a description of what already happened. A connected planning process should allow finance to model multiple scenarios quickly, stress-test assumptions, and present leadership with a genuine forward view. If that takes weeks to produce, the problem is structural.

4. Business Partners Don't Trust Your Numbers

When commercial, operations, or supply chain leaders start building their own shadow spreadsheets because they don't trust the finance numbers — that's a signal. It means the data, the timing, or the granularity of finance outputs isn't meeting the needs of the business. This is often a symptom of disconnected systems: finance plans in one place, the business operates in another, and the two never fully reconcile.

5. Your Team Is Exhausted at Forecast Time

If your FP&A team regularly works evenings and weekends during budget season — not because the analysis is complex, but because the data preparation is — that's unsustainable. High turnover in FP&A teams is often traced directly back to the burden of manual processes, not the difficulty of the work itself.

What EPM Actually Solves

Enterprise Performance Management platforms — Anaplan, Jedox, OneStream, BOARD, and others — are often described as "planning tools." That's technically accurate but undersells what they actually do.

At their core, EPM platforms solve a connectivity problem. They connect your ERP (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics) to your planning models, so actuals flow in automatically — no manual data pulls, no copy-paste from GL reports. They connect Finance to the business, so commercial teams can input their own assumptions directly into the model. And they connect plan to forecast to actuals in a single, governed data environment.

What changes with EPM in place:

Faster cycles — Budget and forecast cycles that took months compress to weeks, because data preparation is automated and consolidation happens in real time.

One version of the truth — Every stakeholder looks at the same numbers from the same source, updated on the same schedule.

Real scenario modelling — Finance can build and run multiple scenarios in hours, not days — allowing leadership to make decisions based on forward-looking analysis.

Business partner self-service — Operational teams can input their own drivers and assumptions, reducing the back-and-forth between finance and the business.

Audit trail and governance — Every assumption, change, and approval is logged — critical for board reporting, external audit, and regulatory compliance.

The Common Objection: "We're Too Small for EPM"

This is the most frequent pushback we hear from mid-market finance leaders — and it's largely a misconception left over from the early days of EPM, when platforms like Hyperion required expensive infrastructure and lengthy implementations.

Modern EPM platforms are cloud-native, modular, and designed to scale. Jedox, for example, is purpose-built for Excel-familiar finance teams and can be implemented in eight to twelve weeks. The total cost of ownership is often lower than the ongoing cost of maintaining a complex spreadsheet environment — when you factor in the staff time, the errors, and the risk.

The right question isn't "Are we big enough for EPM?" It's "What is our broken FP&A process costing us?"

Choosing the Right Platform

Not all EPM platforms are equal — and the right choice depends heavily on your industry, ERP, team size, and planning complexity.

Platform	Best For	Sweet Spot
Anaplan	Large, complex multi-function planning	High user counts, cross-departmental data flows
Jedox	Mid-market, Excel-familiar teams	Fast time-to-value, integrated planning and analytics
OneStream	Complex consolidation needs	Multi-GAAP reporting, frequent M&A activity
BOARD	Unified BI and planning	Fast deployment, no-code customisation

Keansa is certified across all four platforms and is independent of any single vendor — so our recommendation is always based on your requirements, not our margin.

Where to Start

If you recognise your FP&A process in the signs described above, the starting point isn't an RFP or a platform demo. It's an honest assessment of where the time is going, what decisions are being made on stale data, and what the cost of the status quo really is.

That's the conversation we have with every new client — before we recommend any technology.

Keansa Solutions helps mid-enterprise Finance teams modernise their FP&A processes through EPM implementation, process redesign, and connected planning. If your budget cycle is too long or your forecast is too slow, let's talk.

Talk to a Keansa Consultant