Bryan Lapidus, FPAC, develops corporate finance practitioners at the Association for Financial Professionals.
Traditional finance processes were designed for stability: annual budgets, rigid reporting cycles and exhaustive measurement frameworks. But yesterday’s assumptions may not hold tomorrow, and these approaches can slow decision-making and limit responsiveness. To thrive and add value, finance must shift from a compliance-driven function to an enabler of agility to handle change and disruption.
In my interactions with CFOs and financial professionals at conferences, roundtables and private discussions, I constantly challenge them by asking: Are your processes enabling agility or creating friction? Here are four practical themes to build more agile finance processes:
1. Alignment: Use An Integrated Planning Process
Agility starts with alignment. An integrated planning process brings the varied elements of an organization together to create a coherent, connected set of actions and align resources. Finance collaborates with business units and HR to link headcount, operational drivers and financial outcomes.
My survey research at the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), to be published in January 2026, shows that senior executives consider their planning process to be well aligned with strategic goals, well-communicated across the C-suite and of high utility among executives. However, the survey scores drop by about 20% for the typical markers of tactical integration: horizontal alignment across operations, collaboration among operations and consistency of models. Tools like driver-based planning and rolling forecasts ensure that updates cascade across the model quickly.
One of our member companies addressed this by implementing a rigorous driver-based plan. All models and expense lines automatically adjust based on projected revenue, and managers have been trained on how to apply this to their business. A human-in-the-loop allows for judgment and oversight to be incorporated into the plan.
Another company implemented a continuous planning cycle by linking various planning time frames. Their multiyear projections inform the annual operating plan and serve as the foundation for forecasts; these rolling forecasts guide budget development and shape the long-range plan. This ongoing process helps smooth the level of effort evenly throughout the year and ensures continuous contact with the business.
2. Trigger-Based Forecasting: Plan When It Matters
Traditional forecasting is like checking the weather once a quarter and hoping it doesn’t rain. Agile finance flips the script with event-driven or trigger-based planning—forecasting triggered by actual business events, not arbitrary calendar dates.
Finance and business can predefine the triggers of a reevaluation, like a competitor entering the market, a shift in sales projections, product launches or supply chain disruptions. The periodic business reviews remain, but this approach ensures forecasts remain relevant without burdening teams with constant rework.
An energy company described how they reduced their planning effort by 20% in successive years by determining the level of analysis required for a major asset. They set triggers on the assumptions driving their model and would reforecast when the conditions in the market or in operations necessitated a reforecast.
3. Metric Minimalism: Don’t Measure Everything
In pursuit of precision, finance often measures too much—tracking dozens of KPIs that dilute focus and slow reporting. Agile processes prioritize critical metrics that drive decisions, not vanity measures.
“An organization left to its own devices will measure everything, explain nothing, and not have a clue where the money comes from or goes,” said Steve Beam, Partner at Bain & Company, at an AFP webinar.
Extraneous metrics carry concealed costs, requiring resources to generate, maintain and review them both internally and with partners—and worse, they can lead to outcomes that are not strategically aligned.
Set a goal to eliminate one-third of your reports, streamline another third and automate the rest. Plan to audit and scrub your metric library and retire the ones that no longer serve a purpose. Which metrics truly influence resource allocation? Which indicators predict risk or opportunity? Best-in-class FP&A teams track seven to 10 KPIs at the corporate level.
4. Strategic Clarity: Look Through The Noise
Finance helps a business see through the noise by focusing beyond what is immediately in front of the team.
Use scenario planning to anticipate a range of possible futures, rather than reacting to every market fluctuation. Bring together different parts of the company to learn about risks and opportunities, stress-test strategies and models, identify risks early and prepare thoughtful responses. This approach clarifies which variables truly matter, helping you cut through distractions and focus on what will drive outcomes.
Additionally, set long-term goals to provide a strategic anchor beyond the annual budget and increase stability in a disruptive world with long-term ambitions. Ensure that short-term decisions support the broader vision by keeping your organization focused on sustainable growth rather than just meeting budget targets.
A major European pharma divisional CFO said in an AFP webinar:
“In the past, the whole company would wait for the annual set of official goals coming from the top and then develop their own goals to fit that framework. Now, we have defined 10-year ambitions for the company overall and each division based on foundational principles; we define our own tasks, deliverables and experiments that align with these long-term ambitions.
“We work in what we call outcome-based planning, which is very close to outcomes and key results (OKRs) and have 90-day cycles that allow for small adjustments to maintain alignment with the ambitions.”
The Bottom Line
Agile finance processes aren’t about abandoning rigor—they’re about building flexibility into the system. They combine discipline with adaptability to help organizations respond to change while maintaining controls. When markets shift overnight, supply chains falter or customer demand changes unpredictably, the speed and adaptability of your finance function matter more than ever.
Agile finance adds value to the CFO by aligning the finance function with corporate strategy. It provides guardrails of financial control to find room to maneuver in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous market.
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