Spreadsheets Persist for Revenue Forecasting
Taimur Abdaal, CEO and co-founder of Causal, on the future of the "better spreadsheet"
The real opening is that enterprise FP&A systems often win the approval workflow, but not the actual thinking work behind revenue forecasts. Headcount and opex planning are repetitive enough to fit a structured planning system, while revenue planning often depends on business specific logic like customer cohorts, geography mixes, pipeline stages, ramp curves, churn, and pricing changes. That pushes teams back into spreadsheets for the custom model, then back into the system of record for consolidation.
-
This split shows up across multiple vendors. Causal describes large customers using Adaptive Planning or Anaplan for approvals, budgeting, and rollups, while keeping complex revenue logic in a separate model. Runway describes the same pattern, where teams still build the forecast in spreadsheets and paste the result into enterprise tools.
-
The reason is not that incumbents ignore revenue planning. Anaplan and Workday both now market revenue, sales, and subscription forecasting products with scenario modeling, CRM inputs, and pipeline analytics. The gap is that real company revenue models are often more bespoke than productized planning templates can comfortably handle.
-
That creates room for two different challengers. Tools like Causal and Runway try to become the flexible modeling layer for custom forecasts. Tools like Vena go the other way and embrace Excel as the modeling surface, then add integrations, permissions, and collaboration on top for midmarket finance teams.
The market is heading toward a stack where revenue planning gets pulled closer to live operational data and away from static spreadsheet files, but the winner will be the product that can keep spreadsheet level flexibility without losing workflow control. That is why custom modeling, not just budgeting workflow, is becoming the key battleground in FP&A.