Planning Lives in Department Spreadsheets
Siqi Chen, CEO of Runway, on building browser-based collaborative FP&A
The real planning system in most companies lives outside finance, which means forecast accuracy depends on pulling each team’s working model into one shared model, not just collecting budget inputs. Sales often has a pipeline sheet, marketing has a lead funnel sheet, and engineering has a hiring or roadmap sheet. If those sheets stay separate, finance is consolidating snapshots of other teams’ thinking instead of the actual logic they use to run the business.
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Incumbents like Anaplan became valuable by connecting plans across functions and automating updates from core systems, but teams still often do the real what happens next thinking in spreadsheets. That is why newer tools focus on becoming the place where department leaders build the model itself, not just submit numbers back to finance.
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This is the same gap other modern finance tools are chasing. Equals frames the analyst workflow as live data plus spreadsheet plus dashboard, because analysis still starts in a sheet, gets published into a dashboard, then returns to the sheet when something looks off. The spreadsheet remains the working surface for investigation and forecasting.
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Different vendors attack the problem from opposite directions. Runway tries to replace fragmented department sheets with a browser based shared model tied to 750 plus integrations. Vena keeps Excel at the center, then adds workflow and system connectivity on top. The market is deciding whether finance teams want a new canvas or a better spreadsheet wrapper.
The category is moving toward planning systems that look more like company operating software than finance software. The winner will be the tool that department heads actually use to model hiring, campaigns, pipeline, and product bets day to day, because once that behavior moves into one system, finance gets a living forecast instead of a quarterly spreadsheet collection exercise.