Gartner says spreadsheets are dying. Finance teams must catch up

It’s October 2025, which means finance teams everywhere are gearing up for the annual budgeting cycle. For too many, that still involves staring at spreadsheets deep into the night, scrolling through endless tabs, chasing down broken links, and arguing over whose version is the “final” one or the “final, final one”.

Here we are, in the middle of the AI decade, and finance leaders are still relying on tools that were never designed to carry the weight of modern business planning.

The truth is, 2025 should be the last year any serious finance function budgets in spreadsheets.

The business environment won’t wait for an annual budget to catch up. Over the past few years, finance teams have faced inflation shocks, tariff changes, geopolitical instability, and unprecedented supply chain disruption. Now, generative AI is reshaping cost bases and business models at speed. Under these conditions, the idea of approving a budget in September and expecting it to still be valid in March is fanciful. By the time numbers are consolidated, the assumptions underpinning them are already obsolete.

And yet the process drags on. Finance teams spend more time stitching together spreadsheets than they do analyzing the numbers that matter. Analysts have pointed out the cost of this dependency for years. Gartner has forecast that by 2026, over 70% of finance organizations will have moved away from spreadsheets as their primary planning tool. The market for FP&A platforms is already growing at double-digit rates, heading towards nearly $10 billion by the end of the decade. This isn’t hype, it’s the reality of what forward-thinking CFOs are already doing.

You only need to look at the data from Workday’s Adaptive Planning to see the impact. Finance teams using the platform report planning cycles that are up to 70% faster, with productivity lifted by around 50%. These aren’t marginal gains. They’re transformations. Faster cycles mean forecasts that reflect today’s market, not last quarter’s. Greater productivity means finance professionals are advising the business, not drowning in reconciliations.

I’ve seen this first-hand in client organizations. When law firms cut budgeting time from 12 weeks to five, the real win isn’t the calendar time saved, it’s the shift in credibility. Boards are suddenly dealing with numbers that feel current and trustworthy. When retailers move to daily reporting by channel and region, they stop making decisions in the rear-view mirror. And when manufacturers can model “what if” scenarios in hours rather than weeks, risk management becomes proactive rather than defensive.

But let’s not forget the human side of this. Spreadsheet budgeting doesn’t just slow down decision-making, it burns people out. It normalizes midnight reconciliations and weekends lost to version control. It reduces highly trained finance professionals to manual data wranglers. For a generation of finance talent that expects purpose, agility, and modern tools, that’s a culture killer.

This is where 2025 feels like a tipping point. Boards are demanding real-time answers, not end-of-month reports. AI is weaving its way into every finance process, from predictive forecasting to anomaly detection. And talent expectations are shifting, bright young analysts don’t want to spend their careers trapped in spreadsheet purgatory. The writing is on the wall for Excel as the backbone of FP&A.

So let’s be clear: spreadsheets will always have their place. They’re brilliant for quick analysis or building a one-off model. But they are no longer fit for purpose as the foundation of a company’s budgeting and forecasting. The finance function of 2025 and beyond demands rolling forecasts, scenario agility, and real-time visibility.

The best time to have modernized was yesterday. The second-best time is today.

Finance leaders face a choice: enter another budgeting season with spreadsheets groaning under the weight of assumptions, errors, and wasted time or finally step into a world where planning is faster, sharper, and more human.

2025 is the year to make that decision. And if it isn’t, then brace yourself for another lost year of copy-paste firefights and credibility at risk. Because the world is moving on, whether finance teams do or not.

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