Spreadsheets Still Dominate FP&A
Siqi Chen, CEO of Runway, on building browser-based collaborative FP&A
The core weakness in legacy FP&A software is that it often became a system of record, not a system where real thinking happens. Finance teams use Anaplan, Oracle, and similar tools to pull in data, run budget collection workflows, and publish plans, but the actual forecasting logic still lives in Excel or Google Sheets owned by operators in sales, product, and engineering. That means the software captures the final answer, but not the real reasoning that produced it.
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Incumbents do solve a real problem. They connect to ERP, CRM, and other systems, and they speed up quarterly planning by replacing emailed templates with workflow pages, reminders, and approvals. That is valuable enough for companies to pay large contracts, even if users still prefer to model elsewhere.
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The complaint from practitioners is not that these tools are useless, it is that they are rigid. Department leaders still keep separate spreadsheets for headcount, pipeline, marketing spend, and product plans, because that is where they can change assumptions quickly without breaking a locked down planning system.
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That gap is why newer vendors split in two directions. Runway, Causal, and Equals try to make the browser tool itself feel like the spreadsheet, with live data and collaboration built in. Vena takes the opposite view, and wins by leaning into Excel rather than trying to replace it.
The market is moving toward tools that either become the native place where operators do planning, or accept that Excel remains the native interface and build around it. The winners will be the products that capture assumptions at the moment they are made, not after someone pastes the output into a reporting layer.