Excel in FP&A, by the numbers

How many finance teams use Excel? Ask a room of FP&A people and the question gets a laugh, because the answer seems obvious. Read the marketing for planning software and you might think spreadsheets were on their way out. This page gathers the Excel in FP&A statistics that stand up, mostly from 2020 to 2026, so you can see where your own team sits and know which numbers to trust.

It’s part of the research behind our essay In defence of Excel, which opens with one number from these surveys. Here are the rest, with their sources.

A good deal of the published data on planning tools is paid for by companies that sell planning software. So we lead with independent sources, chiefly the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), the analyst firm ISG, Lightcast job-posting data and the professional bodies, and we flag every vendor-sponsored figure with its sample size and year.

Excel in FP&A statistics: the key figures

Read the first column closely. Using spreadsheets and planning mainly in spreadsheets are different questions, and they get very different answers.

How many finance teams use Excel?

The best independent answer comes from an FP&A tools survey by the AFP, an independent professional body, which names no sponsor for it. In autumn 2024 it asked 362 FP&A and finance practitioners around the world which tools they use and how often. Spreadsheets were in every respondent’s toolkit, with “96% of survey respondents using them for planning, 93% using them for reporting purposes on a daily or weekly basis, and all using them on at least a quarterly basis.” AFP added:

“These numbers hold true when considering company size, geography, type of ownership and level of seniority.”

So if you open Excel every week to plan or report, you’re the norm, in a large company or a small one, in any region, at any level. AFP’s own glossary shortens the finding to “100% of FP&A professionals use spreadsheets as a reporting tool”. That rounds “at least quarterly” up to always, but the point survives: nobody in the benchmark did the job without a spreadsheet.

These are not teams short of software. 71% of respondents also used EPM tools for planning at least quarterly, and more than half used them daily or weekly. “More than half of survey respondents reported using at least eight categories and 10 types of reporting tools on a quarterly basis.” The toolkit is several tools deep, and the spreadsheet is the one piece found in every kit. Nor has AI displaced it: just 23% used AI daily, weekly or monthly, and 40% were “in the testing phase and plan to implement AI in the next year”.

How many companies still budget mainly in spreadsheets?

Running the plan itself in spreadsheets is a different question. Here the answer is about half, and falling slowly.

The longest run of figures comes from the FP&A Trends Survey, published by the FP&A Trends Group, a think tank that has collected responses since 2017. Both recent editions were vendor-sponsored. It tracks the “main planning/forecasting application in use”, and the share answering “mainly spreadsheet based” was 60% in 2022, 52% in 2024 and 45% in 2025. The 2025 edition drew on 459 finance professionals, 43% of them at companies with revenue above $1 billion, so this is no small-company sample. Even so, its authors write that “spreadsheets remain the single most dominant tool for financial planning.” Next in 2025 came modern cloud planning platforms at 21%, older-generation systems at 17%, home-grown or hybrid tools at 9% and accounting-system modules at 8%. As the main planning tool, spreadsheets still lead the next category by more than two to one.

The independent analyst firm ISG (formerly Ventana Research) reaches a similar number. Its Office of Finance benchmark research, cited in 2021, found that “a majority (56%) of midsize and larger organizations still rely on manual processes built around desktop spreadsheets for core financial functions such as planning and budgeting.” In its 2023 buyers guide to business-planning software, published in August 2024, ISG still calls stand-alone spreadsheets “the most popular software for planning and budgeting”. That comes from an analyst whose job is rating planning software.

The same analyst makes the case against, and it’s fair to include it: “66% of companies using a dedicated planning application have a process that works well, compared to 36% that rely on desktop spreadsheets.” Spreadsheets lead on adoption even where analysts rate them lower on process.

So the two measures tell different stories. Use at all sits at close to everyone, at every size of company and level of seniority. Use as the main planning tool is about half and slipping, mainly in the vendor-sponsored series. Virtually every FP&A team uses Excel every week, and about half still run the plan itself in spreadsheets.

Does planning software replace Excel?

Not on the evidence so far. In a May 2025 article built on the same benchmark, AFP reported that “Seventy-one percent of survey respondents said they have EPM tools, yet spreadsheets continue to prop up planning”. Spreadsheets were used “in conjunction with EPMs (85%)”, “to prepare data for EPMs (82%)” and “to bypass EPMs (57%)”. AFP called the situation a “tyranny of spreadsheets”, so these numbers come from a critic of the spreadsheet, not a fan.

That puts Excel in three places around a planning system: before it, preparing its data; beside it; and instead of it, working around it. And since every respondent used spreadsheets, every EPM user in the sample was a spreadsheet user too. For most FP&A functions the practical question isn’t Excel or planning software. It’s which jobs stay in Excel.

Buying the tool hasn’t shortened the budget season either. AFP’s 2026 benchmark, of 332 FP&A and finance professionals in 54 countries, found this:

“Despite widespread adoption of planning tools, the average budgeting cycle still takes nearly nine weeks, unchanged over three years”

AFP’s reading is that “investments in planning technology have not yet delivered expected efficiency gains”. The investment will keep coming all the same. Deloitte’s CFO Signals survey asked 200 CFOs of North American companies with at least $1 billion in revenue, in March 2026, which technologies matter most for managing costs. “The No. 1 response is cloud-based planning, budgeting, and forecasting, chosen by 43% of respondents”. If the past is a guide, the new platforms will sit alongside Excel rather than replace it.

How much of the day stays in the grid? The only figures come from a survey by a finance-software company of 212 finance professionals in October 2025, reported by CFO.com: an average of 5.4 hours a day in spreadsheets, and 89% saying more than half of their financial processes and workflows run through Excel. Those are a vendor’s numbers, but they point the same way as AFP’s.

Why do FP&A teams still use Excel?

No independent survey has asked FP&A practitioners to rank their reasons. What we have is what they say, and it is consistent.

The most direct account comes from AFP’s FP&A Advisory Council, in that May 2025 article. The first reason is familiarity: “Everyone has a good grip on Excel”. The rest are about the alternative. Moving to an EPM “is akin to writing with their non-dominant hand”. After rollout, systems become “watered-down”, until the job “now requires three times the amount of work”. EPMs are designed for “HQ to get a complete picture of the company at the top level”, not for local teams. When implementations “ran out of money”, “the spreadsheets have taken over again”. And with data spread across disparate systems, spreadsheets become “a common platform”. Several of these reasons are mirror images of weaknesses in planning software: Excel’s strengths and the gaps in dedicated systems are two sides of the same fact.

In a 2018 AFP article by Bill Myers, practitioners credited Excel with “flexibility, ubiquity and economy”: it bends to the problem, everyone has it, and it’s already paid for. They also made a point anyone who has inherited a model will recognise:

“Excel’s transparency has played a big part in the democratization of financial information”

Anyone can open the file and follow the logic in the cells, which is why Excel works as a common language for finance, the auditors and the rest of the business.

Even a vendor-sponsored report concedes the central point. The authors of the 2025 FP&A Trends Survey write: “Their flexibility continues to serve ad hoc and decentralized teams well, especially where resources are constrained or governance is loose.” ISG’s Robert Kugel, who argues that spreadsheets are the wrong choice for enterprise planning, still writes that “Spreadsheets are the tool of choice for personal productivity”. The debate is about how far that individual speed scales, not whether it exists.

One reason is rarely said out loud: control. Howcroft’s 2006 case study of a spreadsheet-based financial planning process, at the UK manufacturing and R&D subsidiary of a European multinational, was action research, meaning research done from the inside by someone taking part in the work. Its conclusion is blunt: “Changes to the existing financial planning process were not implemented because they threatened to alter the existing distribution of power within the finance organisation.” Whoever owns the model owns the numbers.

In short, practitioners give five kinds of reason:

• Familiarity. Everyone already knows it, so there’s no training and hand-offs are easy.
• Flexibility. It copes with ad hoc questions that change from week to week.
• Cost and availability. It’s already licensed on every desk.
• Control. The logic of the model stays with the people who answer for it.
• A common platform. It joins data from systems that don’t talk to each other.

Is Excel a required skill for finance jobs?

Yes, and job ads treat it as the entry ticket. Lightcast job-posting data, published by the education publisher McGraw Hill in April 2025, ranks Microsoft Excel first among the software skills US employers requested or required when hiring accounting or finance professionals between March 2023 and March 2024. It was named in 932,287 unique postings. No total is given, so that’s a rank, not a share.

It has been true for a while. In nearly eight million US postings from 2013–14 for middle-skill jobs (more than high school, less than a bachelor’s degree), Burning Glass Technologies found that “Spreadsheet and word processing proficiencies have become a baseline requirement for the majority of middle-skill opportunities (78%).”

For finance roles the bar is higher. A 2019 study of UK online job postings, carried out by Burning Glass for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, put it this way:

“For financial analysts, Microsoft Excel plays a different role where it functions as a tool to execute the core business analyses that are part of the role. A high degree of proficiency is required for success, as evidenced by additional requirements such as advanced subskills of Excel such as VBA and Pivot Tables.”

The same study found that the jobs most likely to name Excel explicitly are “decidedly less analytical roles, such as administrative assistants and human resources assistants.” Our reading is that finance employers often take Excel for granted, so job-ad counts probably understate its place in finance. What they pay extra for sits on top of it: for financial analysts, knowing SQL came with a 25% pay differential (£51,900 a year, against £41,300 overall).

Employers of new graduates agree. In a 2013–14 survey reported by Formby, Medlin and Ellington in 2017, 96% of 107 employer managers and advisory-board members agreed that Excel skills are “very important skills that students need when they graduate”, and none disagreed. People already in the job give Excel credit too. In the vendor-sponsored survey of 212 finance professionals, 90% said Excel proficiency had helped their career progression.

What the professional bodies expect

The professional bodies are split. ICAEW goes furthest. Its Spreadsheet Competency Framework, first published in 2016 and now in a second edition dated 2026, sets out 82 competencies across four levels (basic, general, creator and developer), and the new edition adds dynamic arrays, LAMBDA, Python and “six new competencies” on using AI. Anyone who uses an organisation’s spreadsheets should be at basic level or above, and “those who design spreadsheets for an organisation should, at a minimum, be at the creator level.” ICAEW is explicit about what the framework replaces:

“The structured approach supersedes the ambiguous claim, familiar to many CVs, of being ‘proficient with Microsoft Excel’.”

Among the roles it maps are “industry accountants”, “often undertaking varied roles that range from preparing budgets and forecasts to analysing datasets”, for whom “robust design and adherence to best practice are core competencies”. For FP&A, that is a more precise vocabulary for a job spec or a CV than a bare claim of proficiency.

The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) gives spreadsheets a smaller place. Its 2019 competency framework runs from “Limited knowledge” to “Expert”, and spreadsheets sit on the second rung, “Basic knowledge”: “Create spreadsheets and manipulate data using basic functions and formulas such as graphs, filtering and sorting data, and importing data”. There, spreadsheet skill is where analytics starts, not where it ends. The CGMA Competency Framework of AICPA & CIMA (2023) doesn’t mention spreadsheets or Excel at all. Its foundational planning competency reads: “Apply basic modelling, forecasting and planning techniques to develop cost forecasts with cost drivers identified and explained.” It tests what you can model, not where you model it.

So Excel is the entry ticket. What sets people apart sits on top of it: modelling discipline, which ICAEW now spells out competency by competency, and data skills such as SQL.

What the numbers don’t show

The reasons are the thinnest part of the evidence. No independent survey ranks flexibility, familiarity, cost, control, speed or ease of sharing, and the only percentages on how finance staff feel about Excel are vendor-sponsored. The main-tool trend rests mainly on a vendor-sponsored series too. AFP’s full report is for members only, so the base for its 85%, 82% and 57% isn’t public. There’s no independent measure of how many planning hours go into Excel at companies that own planning software, and we know of no dataset that isolates FP&A job ads.

Some popular numbers can’t be traced at all. A claim attributed to Gartner, that by 2026 over 70% of finance organisations will have moved away from spreadsheets as their primary planning tool, appears in an online article that names no document or analyst, and it can’t be traced to any Gartner publication. A 92% daily-use figure for the AFP survey, reported in the trade press, isn’t on AFP’s public pages. And results from the BPM Pulse, a long-running survey by the advisory firm BPM Partners, circulate mainly in planning vendors’ reprints, with the originals behind a registration form, so we have left them out.

Taken together, the numbers back the opening claim of In defence of Excel: whatever else is on the desk, Excel is the one tool in every FP&A kit. For why it survives next to ERPs and planning systems inside real organisations, see Why finance never left Excel. For the youngest finance staff, see Excel across generations. The next post in the series looks at where Excel breaks.