How to improve your FP&A fitness at any stage

You know your FP&A team can be better. The trick is knowing what to prioritize: making a plan to level up and executing on it.

In the first two posts in this series, we laid the groundwork. Post one introduced the six vital signs of FP&A fitness and the diagnostic tool we built to measure them. Post two walked through what “great” looks like at each growth stage, from seed through Series D and beyond.

This post is about what actually moves the needle, based on hundreds of FP&A Fitness Test submissions.

Start with what you can control

One thing FP&A teams at every size, industry, and maturity level share is constraints. Budget, headcount, tooling, org-wide buy-in…there are always trade-offs. Thinking these will disappear at the next revenue milestone or funding round is a flawed assumption.

Instead, the most effective teams focus on the levers they can pull right now.

Whether you’re a solo FP&A hire or running a 20-person team, these are universal principles that separate good FP&A teams from great ones.

1. Close the books faster (without sacrificing accuracy)

This is the single most common starting point for FP&A teams trying to level up—and for good reason. Close speed is visible, measurable, and directly within your control. And it sets the pace for everything that follows.

A slow close compresses every downstream activity: variance analysis, forecast updates, board reporting, and strategic conversations all get pushed back or rushed. If your close takes 15 business days, you’re spending half the month looking backward before you can look forward.

Our data shows that about half of finance teams take eight or more business days to get management reports out after close. While smaller teams tend to have slower closes, about half of later-stage teams still need more than a week to get management reporting out the door. And only about 20% say recurring reporting is mostly or fully automated.

Cutting a close from 15 days to 7 is much more about process rigor than bringing in new tools. Start with:

• A documented close calendar with clear owners
• Standardized journal entry templates
• Hard cutoff for accrual adjustments

Once you compress the close, everything else opens up: more time for analysis, better forecasts, and fewer instances of your CFO breathing down your neck asking for actuals.

2. Build one source of truth (and defend it)

A speedy close is a worthy goal for every finance team, but even more important is having consistent, trustworthy numbers.

There shouldn’t be any doubt in the numbers anywhere in the company. If there is, it’s a sign your data foundation needs attention. This is something that will only compound if not addressed at the root.

FP&A Fitness Test data suggests this is a major structural gap. Only 28% of teams report a broadly centralized or fully governed source of truth, and just 9% say it’s fully governed with access controls.

But closing that gap is worth it: teams with a strong data foundation are nearly five times more likely to say KPI definitions are actually owned and trusted across the business (38% vs. 8%).

It’s not realistic to expect early-stage teams to stand up a perfectly-governed data warehouse. But every team should work towards a few non-negotiables:

• One place where actuals live that everyone agrees is authoritative
• KPI definitions that are documented, not tribal knowledge
• A version control system that eliminates “Q3_forecast_v4_FINAL_actualfinal.xlsx” and anything of the sort

Once you’ve achieved these basics, “great” varies a lot from stage to stage. For seed-stage startups, it’s a well-maintained spreadsheet that the CEO trusts without caveats. At Series B and beyond, you’ll usually want  a centralized system with governed access and automated data feeds replacing manual exports.

The specifics change as the business scales. The principle doesn’t.

3. Integrate your planning models

A defining growing pain of FP&A teams is finding a way to consolidate all your data sources. You start out ERP-centric, with separate models for revenue, headcount, and Opex layered on top. Eventually, though, those models start pulling from more systems—HRIS for headcount, CRM for pipeline, billing systems for revenue, and more.

Siloed models may cut it for awhile, but untangling them becomes a mess as systems multiply and complexity ratchets up.

Deep down, most teams know their one-off models aren’t sustainable. But they keep patching things together because rebuilding feels like a bigger lift than maintaining the status quo.

This is one of the biggest inflection points in FP&A maturity: evolving from disconnected inputs to a governed data layer that underpins everything. And a lot of teams are still on the wrong side of it: about 35% are still working from disconnected templates or manually reconciled spreadsheets.

Getting there is a process. Start with the highest-impact connections:

• Link headcount to Opex—compensation is usually your largest cost
• Connect revenue drivers to capacity

From there, steadily link all your models to the underlying data layer.

4. Automate repeatable reporting

Every manually-assembled report is time that doesn’t go toward analysis, storytelling, or strategic work. Without a conscious effort to automate, reporting will consume all your bandwidth.

And the hidden cost is arguably worse than the visible one: when FP&A spends most of its time building decks, leadership starts to see FP&A as a reporting function. That perception is hard to reverse.

There’s a lot of room for improvement here across the board. Only about 18% of teams say recurring reporting is mostly or fully automated, but those teams are far more likely to be viewed as trusted advisors or strategic partners by leadership (63% vs. 26% for manual or template-heavy teams).

You don’t need to automate everything. Start with the reports you produce most frequently: the monthly close package, the weekly cash snapshot, the board deck template. If you can take a recurring deliverable from four hours of manual assembly to 30 minutes of review and commentary, you’ve bought yourself significant capacity for higher-value work.

This is also where better tooling can create real leverage. Spreadsheets are flexible, but downloading CSVs is inherently inefficient. Instead, look for tools that can complement your spreadsheets by automatically updating the data within them.

5. Earn a seat at the strategic table

This is the lever that shows up last on most FP&A improvement lists, but it’s arguably the one that matters most.

Based on our data, most finance functions are struggling to shed the “bean counter” label:

• Just 32% of teams are viewed as trusted advisors or strategic partners
• Only 26% say their reporting consistently includes real implications and recommended actions
• A mere 10% have a formal intake process or capacity-based prioritization for FP&A work.

Many will say that they don’t have the bandwidth to participate in strategic discussions because they’re buried in reporting work. That’s exactly what the first four levers are meant to fix.

This is exactly where that extra capacity should go. Even small shifts in how FP&A shows up can change how the function is perceived:

• Stop delivering reports that just describe what happened. Add implications and recommended actions. “Revenue missed by 4%” becomes “Revenue missed by 4%, here’s why, here’s the impact on the full-year outlook, and here are two options for how to close the gap.”
• Build a real intake process for FP&A requests. Not just a queue—a way to prioritize based on strategic impact so you’re not just responding to whoever asks loudest.
• Translate company strategy into explicit financial targets and tradeoffs. When FP&A shapes resource allocation instead of just tracking it, the perception shifts.

This takes time—best to start early. Credibility compounds, and every leadership meeting where you present a point of view along with the numbers adds up.

FP&A fitness is a journey. See where yours stands + how to level up

Hundreds of FP&A Fitness Test submissions have given us a clear view of where finance teams stand in 2026.

Our biggest takeaway: peak FP&A performance isn’t driven by budget or headcount. Broken processes only get magnified with more resources. It comes from getting the fundamentals right, and building from there.

Take the FP&A Fitness test to see how you stack up against your peers and get a personalized training plan.