Maximizing the ROI of Planning Technology

Modern planning technology works to improve efficiency, productivity, speed, and competitiveness for companies of all sizes and across all industries. It’s a worthwhile investment, to be sure, but once implementation is complete and priorities shift, you might notice the return on investment (ROI) of your planning technology start to decline.

That drop-off doesn’t need to happen. When you plan ahead and continuously align your solution with your goals, you can keep increasing the value of your investment over time.

If the Office of the CFO has any incentive to maximize the ROI on a project, it’s when the project is owned by Finance and Accounting. Financial planning technology solutions are a prime example. It’s clear to finance and accounting that more speed, intuitiveness, and accuracy are immense benefits. The decreases in errors and frustration are well worth the investment, too. But, for those just considering an investment in financial planning technology, it pays to have your justification in line, target processes in sight, and strategic goals in place before you get started.

This blog acts as your guide, bringing together guidance, examples, and practical steps to help you understand where to focus, how to match your goals with the right planning technology, and how to extend the benefits across your entire business. Then, you’ll gain a deeper dive into how to transform your planning process with our Annual Planning checklist.

Who is this guide for?

• Finance professionals looking to justify an investment in planning technology.
• Finance teams seeking to overcome manual, friction-filled planning processes.
• CFOs and finance leaders wanting to add more strategic value to all corners of the business.

What you’ll learn

• Examples and success stories for maximizing the value of planning technology investments for finance and accounting teams.
• Ways to maximize the adoption, usage, and benefits of planning technology throughout Finance, Accounting, and the rest of the business.
• How to align your goals with an investment in the right financial planning technology.

Every organization relies on its financial planning processes to set goals and ensure decisions align with your overall strategy.

For most organizations, that is a slow, manual, and frustrating spreadsheet-driven process. It consumes valuable time from you and your partners, and even with that effort, insights often remain rigid and outdated.

With today’s pressures—from labor shortages to supply disruptions to economic uncertainty—many teams have turned to financial planning technology to alleviate these challenges and champion resilience.

It takes just weeks to deploy financial planning technology, and the benefits come just as quickly. Waiting brings more frustration, more redundancy, more unhappy people on your finance and accounting teams, and more bad decisions from out-of-date, inaccurate plans.

What do you risk when you don’t maximize ROI?

If you’re not taking full advantage of your investment in planning technology, you’re not only wasting money—your financial planning process may become less effective over time. Poor technology decisions can lead to:

• Complacency with the technology and resistance to adopting ongoing enhancements and broader capabilities.
• Duplicative technology causes redundant work, overlapping investments, incomplete insights, and the additional cost and complexity of more data movements.
• Employee churn from unhappy teams stuck with old, manual, and mundane tasks or who are forced to deploy complex, time-consuming workarounds.
• Poor or misguided plans, insights, forecasts, and models result in decreased planning accuracy and bad decisions.
• Misallocation of other investments based on inaccurate forecasts, plans, and models.

Conversely, and more optimally, aligning your technology investment with your goals during the acquisition and continuing to adjust your solution as your objectives shift, will help you to maximize your investment in the technology.

It’s clear that those who invest in digital technology outperform those who don’t. But what further separates leaders from the rest is their ability to plan how they will leverage their investment in technology. Think about it like planning for your planning process, where you’ll maximize the ROI of your planning technology and identify the quickest path to impact.

Before you make additional investment decisions for planning technology, consider the following:

• Decide where to focus your efforts.
• Leverage investments you’ve already made.
• Maximize total business impact.

The key is in setting clear goals, aligning the technology with those goals, and focusing on quick wins. It’s good to have a focused effort and take advantage of existing technology investments. Measuring progress is also helpful in showing momentum and building ongoing support. It’s also important that the business sees and experiences the benefits, such as collaboration, speed, self-service analysis and reporting, and more.

Let’s break these three areas down in more detail.

1. Decide where to focus your efforts.

Understanding your end-to-end financial planning process and where the risks, bottlenecks, and low-value-add activities lie is critical to improving productivity and efficiency.

Look across financial planning, non-financial planning, reporting, forecasting, and modeling. Ask yourself:

• Can this be automated?
• Where does this data go next?
• Where do delays or errors typically occur?

Once you’ve mapped your processes, you’ll see clear areas most in need of improvement.

2. Determine goals and measure progress.

Set short- and long-term goals for improvements and use concrete metrics to measure progress.

For planning or consolidation processes, a decrease in cycle times is a good metric to track. For FP&A or operational planning, an increase in accuracy, a decrease in meetings, or a decrease in time spent planning are all great metrics to improve.

The measurable elements you intend to improve—cost savings, cycle times, responsiveness, nights and weekends worked—will feed into broader growth and performance goals.

3. Maximize the impact in every corner of the business.

As you see success in Finance and Accounting, expand the value outward. Automated, cloud-based planning technology helps the broader business by:

• Enabling easier participation
• Streamlining collaboration with Finance
• Supporting self-service access to financial intelligence
• Improving decision-making at all levels
• Digital acceleration creates tangible benefits for every department.

Automation is a great start, but it’s equally important to enable the business to participate easily in planning processes, collaborate with Finance, and have self-service access to the financial intelligence they need to make better, faster decisions. Ask yourself how you could work better with your business partner.

Real organizations are already proving what’s possible when they focus their planning technology on the areas that create the most drag in the financial planning process. These teams identified their bottlenecks, aligned their goals with the right planning technology, and saw meaningful improvements—both in time savings and financial clarity:

• Specialized Bicycle Components modernized its global workforce planning process and eliminated six full weeks of manual effort from every planning cycle. With cleaner data and automated workflows, their team shifted time from spreadsheet management to higher-value strategic conversations.
• Golden State Foods reduced the time required to develop quarterly business reviews by 50% and removed three days of manual reporting and forecasting work each month. This allowed their Finance team to respond more quickly to operational needs and support leaders with up-to-date insights.
• The Boston Red Sox increased their forecasting agility and saved $500,000 to $1 million in expenses by moving away from an Excel-heavy forecasting process. With more proactive forecasting throughout the year, the organization gained the visibility needed to identify issues earlier and take action sooner.

These stories aren’t exceptions—they’re proof of what happens when you target your most inefficient planning steps and treat planning technology as a long-term investment in accuracy, collaboration, and strategic impact.

The best place to start is right where you are today. Waiting only puts you further behind. It’s important to understand where you want to be with your financial planning capabilities, but it’s even more important to understand where to invest to get there.

Most organizations begin improvements by focusing on financial close and reporting. That approach works, but it’s only the foundation. Your long-term opportunity lies in building a more collaborative, business-wide financial planning process supported by integrated data and ongoing refinement.

As your business changes, your planning technology must change with it. Keeping an honest view of where you are today—and where your planning maturity needs to go—directly influences your ROI.

Digital investments in planning help organizations reduce manual work and give you more time to collaborate with the business. As more processes become automated, you regain the bandwidth to focus on strategic initiatives that deliver meaningful impact.

Maximizing the ROI of planning technology isn’t just about the dollars; it’s about giving the Office of the CFO more confidence, more insight, and more time to guide the business forward using accurate, connected plans.

• ROI grows when your technology evolves with your goals. Small adjustments over time often create the greatest long-term value.
• Your financial planning process shows you exactly where to improve. Bottlenecks, risks, and repetitive tasks point you toward your next high-impact area.
• Your investment becomes more powerful when the business participates. Broader adoption strengthens insights, alignment, and overall confidence in the planning process.

 

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Make your next plan your strongest yet.

Download our free Annual Financial Planning Checklist to get started.

 

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How do I know whether I’m getting the full ROI from my planning technology?

Review cycle times, forecast accuracy, manual work, and adoption across the business. If any of these are declining—or not improving—there’s likely more value you can unlock.

What should I evaluate before investing in financial planning technology?

Clarify your goals, understand your most critical process gaps, evaluate current workflows, and determine which capabilities matter most for your financial planning process.

How quickly can planning technology start showing results?

Most organizations begin seeing benefits within a few weeks of deployment. ROI continues to grow as adoption expands, automation increases, and the business engages more deeply.