FP&A at an Inflection Point: Why Finance Operating Models Are Breaking in 2026

As organizations head into 2026, finance leaders are facing a familiar, but intensifying set of challenges. Across industries and company sizes, the same themes keep emerging in conversations with CFOs, Heads of FP&A, and finance transformation leaders. 

Disconnected systems that don’t tell a single story. 
Manual processes with Excel sitting in the middle. 
FP&A teams spending more time moving data than analyzing it. 
Insights arriving too late to shape decisions. 
Automation and AI available, but slow to adopt. 
Rising expectations for finance to operate more strategically with leaner teams. 

None of this is because finance teams aren’t capable. In most cases, companies simply grew faster than their finance operating model. 

When Growth Outpaces the Finance Operating Model 

Over time, FP&A became the connective tissue holding accounting, payroll, CRM, inventory, and expense data together. When systems don’t line up, people step in. When timelines compress, manual work fills the gap. Excel becomes the integration layer, not because it’s ideal, but because it’s available. 

The result is a finance function that spends a disproportionate amount of time assembling information instead of interpreting it. Finance explains what already happened, rather than helping leaders decide what happens next. 

This model might work at smaller scale. But as transaction volumes grow, business models diversify, and expectations for speed increase, the cracks become impossible to ignore. 

Why Better Tools Haven’t Solved the Problem 

Many organizations have invested heavily in finance systems, analytics platforms, and automation tools. Yet the underlying challenges persist. 

The issue isn’t a lack of technology. 

Data lives across multiple systems that weren’t designed to work together. Processes evolved organically instead of intentionally. Ownership is unclear. Controls are bolted on after the fact. In this environment, even well-intentioned automation and AI efforts struggle to deliver value. 

At Clarendon Partners, we see this play out most clearly in FP&A. Teams are asked to provide real-time insights, scenario modeling, and strategic guidance, while still being responsible for reconciling data, managing workarounds, and validating numbers across systems. The promise of automation collides with the reality of how finance actually operates. 

The Cost of Staying Where We Are 

The cost of the current finance operating model isn’t just inefficiency, it’s missed opportunity. 

When insights arrive late, decisions are made with incomplete information. 
When FP&A is consumed by data movement, strategic thinking gets pushed out. 
When AI is layered onto broken processes, returns fail to materialize. 

In many organizations, this creates a growing expectation gap: leaders want finance to be more strategic, but the operating model makes that nearly impossible. 

The Shift Finance Leaders Are Beginning to Make 

As we move through 2025 and into 2026, the conversation among finance leaders is starting to change. Instead of asking “What tool do we need next?”, the questions are becoming more fundamental: 

• How do we reduce fragmentation across systems without a massive replatforming effort? 

• Where should automation and AI remove repeat work, or replace certain use cases, rather than add noise or complexity? 

• When does fractional or advisory finance make sense to bring senior thinking into decisions earlier? 

• How does FP&A evolve from reporting and variance analysis to true decision support? 

The organizations making progress aren’t chasing shiny technology. They’re rethinking how finance operates, clarifying processes, aligning data and ownership, and designing operating models that scale with the business. 

An Inflection Point for FP&A 

FP&A is at an inflection point. The role is expanding, expectations are rising, and the limits of the current operating model are increasingly visible. 

The next phase of finance won’t be defined by more reports or more tools. It will be defined by operating models that allow finance teams to focus on insight, judgment, and decision support, rather than data assembly. 

This article kicks off a broader series we’ll be sharing throughout the year on how finance leaders are addressing these challenges in practice, from operating model design to automation, AI, and the evolving role of FP&A. 

We’re curious to hear from other finance leaders: what challenges are you seeing as you look ahead to the next phase of FP&A? Reach out to our team to compare notes, share perspectives, and explore how your finance operating model can better support the decisions ahead.