Winners Combine FP&A Integrations and Modeling

The split in modern FP&A has been between companies that automate finance workflows first and companies that rebuild the modeling engine first. In practice, the opposite approach means starting with connectors to QuickBooks, Xero, payroll, CRM, and card systems, then layering dashboards, budget collection, and reporting on top. That can save finance teams time quickly, but it often leaves the hardest job, encoding a company’s custom revenue logic and business mechanics, still living in spreadsheets.

• Runway describes incumbent and newer FP&A tools as valuable because they pull live data from many systems and speed up budget collection across departments. The tradeoff is that many teams still build the real model in spreadsheets, then copy results back into the platform.
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• Pry leaned into this integrations first playbook. Its roadmap centered on QuickBooks, Xero, payroll APIs like Finch, and a lightweight self serve planning layer for startups. That made onboarding easy, but its own scaling constraint was still integrations coverage, not modeling flexibility.
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• The market rewarded distribution and workflow bundling enough that Brex bought Pry in April 2022 for $90M, BILL bought Finmark in November 2022, and Workday had already bought Adaptive Insights in June 2018 for about $1.55B. That shows how workflow heavy FP&A products fit naturally inside broader finance stacks.
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Going forward, the winners are likely to combine both layers. Fast integrations and reporting are becoming the easiest wedge, but durable product value sits in whether a tool can become the place where a company builds its actual operating model, not just the place where finance collects inputs and publishes dashboards.