A once in a hundred year pandemic. An unprecedented interest rate hiking cycle. And now, a once-in-a-generation trade shake-up. You can call it a fluke, but when you rack up three “hundred-year floods” in a decade, it might be time to revisit your assumptions.
This is the macro reality FP&A teams (and everyone else) are living in. Tariffs may be the topic of conversation today, but they’re just the latest flavor of uncertainty. Tomorrow it could be a commodity shock, a natural disaster, or something nobody’s even thought of yet. We don’t have Nostradamus on our payroll, but if we’re placing bets, we’re definitely on the side of more unpredictability rather than less—at least for the near future.
If that’s the case, FP&A teams need to have strategies in place to roll with the punches. And yet, plenty are still treating these shocks like one-offs—scrambling to rebuild models, debating assumptions over email, and playing catch-up when speed matters most.
The old, reactive approach wasn’t built for this level of turbulence. Modern FP&A exists to be nimble and agile in the face of uncertainty, flexing its forecasting muscles when macro waves start building. No one can know exactly what the next one will look like, but the best teams do know how they’ll respond.
Three big blockers to agile financial planning
It’s not that volatility is a new phenomenon. The biggest shocks—your GFCs and dot-com crashes—laid waste to everyone’s plans. But more minor hiccups could be handled within the comfortable cadence of the annual planning cycle.
We’re in a new era now. Plans for the next quarter, much less the next year, need to be able to flex based on up-to-the-minute changes.
Here are three key blockers preventing FP&A teams from moving at the speed modern times require.
1. Scattered drivers
Most finance teams know their external margin drivers like the back of their hand: foreign exchange, freight rates, tariffs, commodity prices. The problem is, those inputs rarely reside in the same place. Tariff information might be buried in customs documents, freight rates in procurement contracts, and FX rates pulled sporadically from public sources. There’s no single place to see it all…let alone act on it.
So when something changes—a 5% duty hike, a spike in shipping costs—analysts end up in a time-consuming scavenger hunt just to assemble the full picture. By the time all the pieces are gathered and manually keyed into models, the opportunity to act quickly and decisively has come and gone.
Unfortunately, this state of affairs is the norm. A study from CFO.com found that “nearly 89% of CFOs say they are making decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete data on a monthly basis.” That just isn’t acceptable anymore. Even a two-day lag can be the difference between steering around a shock and explaining to your board why margins cratered this quarter.
Bottom line: scattered data = scattered decisions.
2. Static models
Most budgets are built on a basic premise: that the next 12 months will look enough like the last 12 to plan with confidence. But the world doesn’t play by those rules anymore. Static spreadsheets and rigid web-based models aren’t built for the pace of change modern finance teams are dealing with. Crossing your fingers that your yearly forecast will hold up is more wishful thinking than a plan.
A few years ago, a spike in input costs might’ve been nothing more than an occasional nuisance. Now it’s a regular occurrence. One unexpected tariff, and suddenly, a model that looked solid in January is on life support by spring. Finance teams end up frantically rebuilding sections of the plan from scratch—rewiring cost bases, margin assumptions, sourcing plans—while the clock ticks.
Bottom line: In a world where assumptions break faster, models have to bend faster.
3. Slow collaboration
When major macro shocks hit, it’s all hands on deck. Finance can’t operate in a vacuum. For example, they need to be in close contact with sourcing teams to validate supplier changes and confirm with the tax group how their models should factor in origin shifts. Pricing needs to decide how much cost can be passed through to customers, and how fast. These conversations need to happen right now.
But when teams are trading spreadsheets over email or swapping feedback across half a dozen Slack threads, speed goes out the window. Plus, confusion creeps in—without a single source of truth anchoring decisions, every input becomes debatable, and every question spawns three more.
Bottom line: When the pressure’s on, collaboration can’t happen in Slack threads or version 19 of a spreadsheet. It needs to happen inside the model in real time.
5 strategies to better navigate macro twists and turns
The best teams aren’t just adapting—they’re baking resilience directly into their planning process.
Here’s what that looks like.
1. Driver-based cost modeling
If you’ve ever been caught manually tracing a tariff hike across 200 SKUs the night before a forecast meeting, you know the pain of static assumptions all too well. These hard-coded inputs, like last quarter’s freight costs or FX rates, tend to be buried in assumption tabs or data tables, locking teams into rigid assumptions that feel "good enough"...until something inevitably breaks.
And lately, things break a lot.
Driver-based planning does away with these static assumptions in favor of real-time drivers: duty rates, commodity indexes, freight surcharges, FX pairs. When they change, the model updates automatically. No rework, no scrambling.
This isn’t a new idea, but many teams have struggled to put it into production at scale. The blockers, like clunky tech tools and scattered data sources, can be hard to overcome.
With Aleph, FP&A can implement driver-based cost modeling directly within the spreadsheets they know and love. Because it’s linked to live data and centralized logic, every duty rate and freight cost updates on the spot. When shocks happen, you can move to implement a mitigation plan right away rather than wasting precious time wrangling data.
2. Scenario libraries
The middle of a crisis is a terrible time to start building scenarios. Yet that’s exactly what too many teams do—scrambling to model “what if” just as the “what” is already happening.
High-caliber FP&A teams keep a set of prebuilt scenarios in their back pocket—baseline, moderate, and severe—ready to deploy at a moment's notice. That way, when the next shock hits, they don’t need to rebuild their plans from scratch. They just need to figure out which play to run.
With Aleph, teams can create and manage these scenarios in minutes. You can expand and fine-tune your assumptions, run your existing models, and create side-by-side comparisons with a few clicks, seeing the full ripple effect without overwriting your baseline. No offline versioning. No rebuilding. Just clean, auditable views you can update on the fly and track with version control.
3. Rolling forecasts
Static plans and volatile markets don’t jive. These days, it’s not uncommon for an annual budget to be obsolete the minute the proverbial ink dries.
Elite FP&A teams know this. They’ve ditched the once-a-year reset in favor of rolling forecasts that update in real time as information enters, tightening the gap between what’s happening and what’s planned.
The best part of opting for rolling is that it doesn’t require rebuilding. Your model is built to flex based on what’s just happened.
4. Shared dashboards across teams
Operational silos are the enemy of collaboration, especially when the macro picture gets murky. The last thing you want during times like these is a game of telephone between finance, ops, and others. It’s inevitable that someone ends up working off a stale file that they thought was “final.”
Shared dashboards are the antidote to file-sharing chaos. Everyone can monitor the same metrics, in the same environment, with the same up-to-date data. In Aleph, these dashboards are a natural extension of your models. You can spin up as many as you need—organized by team, topic, or use case—and control access with granular permissions.
Any dashboard can live pull using your driver-based models, so when assumptions shift, the charts and takeaways reflect it instantly.
- Need to surface the margin impact of a 10-point duty hike? Done.
- Want tax to review exposure by region? Just drop them into the dashboard with comment access and let them weigh in right there.
The best part: you don’t need IT or BI to set any of this up. Aleph’s no-code dashboards give you the flexibility of spreadsheets and the power of a web app, allowing anyone from an analyst to the CFO to build, update, and share them without leaving familiar workflows. It’s the kind of alignment that’s invaluable during uncertain times.
5. Storytelling that drives action
When the pressure’s on to respond to a policy change, executives don’t want to see a wall of numbers. They need a clear, direct story: what just happened? What does it mean for the business? And what should we do about it?
This storytelling aspect is one of the most important and underrated aspects of great FP&A. It’s the difference between saying “costs are up” and “a five-point duty hike trims gross margin by 80bps unless we reprice.” The latter is the kind of insight that actually helps decisions get made.
Aleph makes this kind of storytelling part of the workflow. FP&A can pair live model outputs with dashboards and narrative commentary—all in the same environment. The charts update in real time as assumptions shift. And the story stays connected to the data it’s built on.
Turbulence is here to stay. Plan accordingly.
Tariffs are the latest shock to the system, but they certainly won’t be the last. The specifics may change, but for the best FP&A teams, how they respond doesn’t. They have contingency plays ready to run based on the situation, and dynamic tools that let them work together to find the best solution ASAP.
Aleph provides the framework that makes this possible. Book a free demo to see it in action for yourself.
