Finance and Accounting teams are in the middle of a major shift.
Growth hasn’t slowed, but capacity has – and the only sustainable answer is automation.
The 2025 State of Automation for Finance and Revenue Accounting report surveyed nearly 200 finance professionals across SaaS, e-commerce, and marketplace businesses. The results show a function stretched thin, wrestling with fragmented data, and accelerating toward AI whether it’s ready or not.
Here are five stats finance and accounting leaders should expect to define 2026.
That’s up from 48% last year – a 25-point jump.
Controllers, managers, and specialists feel it most, confirming that operational strain lives closest to the data and the close. Finance isn’t short on effort; it’s short on scalable systems.
"Mentally and physically, we can't keep up." -Director of Accounting, E-commerce company
We asked 200 finance professionals...
What's your biggest barrier to adopting more automation?
In 2024, they said 1) cost and 2) lack of internal resources.
This year's answers were markedly different:
Data quality and internal expertise are two sides of the same problem: too few teams truly understand their data – where it comes from, what it means, and how it connects. Without a trustworthy data foundation, automation just multiplies confusion.
In 2024, only 23% used AI for finance or accounting tasks.
In 2025, that number jumped to 49%.
The three most common use cases:
Finance is no longer debating if AI fits. The question now is where it creates the most leverage without eroding control.
“What worries me most is scaling people and processes fast enough. Our tooling and data pipelines weren’t built for the next 2–3X growth.” -Director of Finance & Accounting, SaaS company
64% of finance and accounting pros say they somewhat or strongly trust AI to perform finance tasks, up 8 points from 2024.
Controllers lead the trust curve (65%), executives are next (58%). Experience appears to drive confidence – hands-on users trust the outputs more than observers.
Half of respondents close their books within five days, yet the top manual process everyone wants to eliminate is data reconciliation (28%).
The close may be faster, but the effort hasn’t disappeared – it’s just hiding behind spreadsheets.
"We already make errors. I'm worried that more complexity will cause other issues I am not even thinking of." -Director of Accounting, E-commerce company
Finance can’t automate its way around bad data.
As companies scale, the true bottleneck isn’t people – it’s architecture.
Building clean, connected data pipelines is what lets automation deliver accuracy and control at scale.
The full report explores: