The State of Automation for Revenue-Accounting
The year finance leaders stopped waiting for capacity to catch up.
Introduction
Back to TopFinance and Accounting in 2025
Finance and Accounting teams are under pressure. Growth hasn’t slowed, but capacity has. The 2025 State of Automation for Finance and Revenue Accounting survey reveals that while automation and AI adoption have surged, many teams still face the same fundamental obstacle: trusting their data.
This year’s findings show:
- 73% of finance pros say the business is growing faster than they can keep up.
- 49% already use AI in some part of their finance or accounting workflow.
- Yet 23% cite data quality as their biggest blocker to using automation more effectively.
The result:
Finance teams are simultaneously doing more, trusting less, and acknowledging that automation is the only realistic path to scalable accuracy.
About the survey
Nearly 200 respondents across finance leadership and individual contributor roles (Controllers, VPs, CFOs, Managers, Directors) and business models (SaaS, E-commerce, Marketplace) shared their experiences in scaling operations, maintaining compliance, and adopting AI and automation.
A handful of questions were repeated from 2024 to highlight year-over-year shifts in trust, adoption, and operational pain points.
Scaling finance under pressure
Back to TopAre the demands of your business growing faster than your Finance and Accounting team can keep up?
What worries you most?
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 business
As your business has grown, what part of finance’s job has become the hardest to scale?
Which aspect of business growth creates the most complexity for your team?
Where does leadership pressure your team the most?
When growth puts pressure on your team, which trade-off happens most often?
What’s the single biggest risk to your Finance team if it can’t keep pace with business growth?
Looking ahead, what worries you most about your team’s ability to keep up with business growth?
What worries you most?
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
What stands out
Finance can’t keep up with growth
- 73% say the business is growing faster than Finance can handle – up sharply from 48% last year.
- The steepest increase came from Managers and Specialists (76%), confirming the pain is felt most by those executing the day to day work.
Scaling is breaking at the data layer
- Revenue recognition and reconciliation (33%) are hardest to scale.
- Hybrid pricing (35%) and multi-geo/currency expansion (31%) are driving new complexity.
- Leadership pressure centers on depth and quality of revenue insights, forecast accuracy, and speed of close – all dependent on clean, unified data.
Revenue accuracy still wins over speed
- When forced to choose, most teams slow down to preserve accuracy.
- Controllers report that quality of output is a more frequent concern than timeline slippage.
Top risks and worries for finance and accounting professionals
- Compliance failures (24%), burnout (23%), and inaccurate reporting (23%) lead the list of finance’s biggest risks.
- Speed, errors, and staffing dominate 2025’s top worries, while being replaced by AI ranks last.
Ultimate takeaway: Finance’s problem isn’t people or effort – it’s scale. Growth has outpaced the systems and processes that keep data clean and compliant.
Operational execution in revenue accounting
Back to TopOn average, how many business days does it take to close the books each month?
When your close is delayed or made harder, what is most often the primary cause?
What worries you most?
That other companies are moving faster and we’re stuck behind.
Revenue Accounting Lead, SaaS business
If you could eliminate one manual finance process tomorrow, which would you choose?
What stands out
The close is getting faster, but not easier
- 51% close within 1–5 business days; 39% within two weeks.
- SaaS and subscription companies take the longest (55% close in 6–14 days) due to reconciliation issues, errors, and last-minute adjustments.
Manual work remains the silent tax
- Data reconciliation across systems (28%) is the #1 manual task teams want to eliminate.
- Journal entries (23%) and revenue recognition schedules (17%) follow closely.
- Executives are most frustrated by manual reporting packages for leadership.
Revenue complexity compounds operational pain
- Finance and Accounting teams struggle most with reconciliation (33%) and adapting to hybrid revenue models (31%) – both tied to fragmented data.
- 35% say new pricing structures are adding the most operational complexity.
Ultimate takeaway: Finance can’t automate fast enough to keep pace. The close may be shorter, but manual effort and the risk of errors hasn’t gone away – it’s just been pushed behind spreadsheets.
Rev rec compliance and confidence
Back to TopHow confident are you that your revenue recognition both complies with standards and would hold up under audit or investor diligence?
What worries you most?
The shortage of skilled workers. We need technology to fill the gap.
Controller, E-commerce business
When you lack confidence in your revenue data, where does that uncertainty come from most often?
What stands out
Confidence is high – but fragile
- 79% feel somewhat or very confident their revenue recognition meets standards and would pass audit.
- 43% of SaaS respondents are “very confident,” while marketplaces and e-commerce trail at ~40%.
- Executives are nearly twice as likely as Controllers to claim strong confidence.
Controllers remain cautious
- 7% of Controllers admit they are not confident in their rev rec compliance.
- Another 36% fall into the “somewhat confident” middle ground.
- Executives, by contrast, reported zero “not confident” responses but were more likely to be neutral.
Why confidence in revenue recognition cracks
- Data complexity (27%), data volume (24%), and manual processes (21%) are the top sources of uncertainty.
- Controllers blame all three. Executives add fragmented systems as a fourth major cause.
Ultimate takeaway: Automation can fix process gaps, but not messy data. Confidence erodes when information flows across too many disconnected systems.
The AI inflection point for finance and accounting
Back to TopDo you trust AI to perform finance tasks?
Are you using AI to perform any finance or accounting tasks or processes today?
What worries you most?
I don’t want AI to wipe out my team, but mentally and physically we can’t keep up.
Director of Accounting, E-commerce business
Where does AI already play a role in your finance and accounting work?
What is the single biggest barrier stopping you from adopting more automation or AI?
What outcome would matter most if automation or AI worked exactly as promised?
What worries you most?
Whether the team can scale quickly enough to handle the increased demands. We need to maintain quality, efficiency, and communication.
Director of Finance, E-commerce business
How important are AI skills and experience for career advancement?
What stands out
Finance’s trust in AI is growing fast
- 64% now trust AI to perform finance tasks, up from 56% in 2024.
- Controllers lead with 65% trust, Managers at 62%, and Executives at 58%.
- Managers saw the biggest YoY jump in trust (+14 pts).
AI adoption nearly doubled year over year
- 49% of respondents already use AI – up from 23% last year.
- Managers lead adoption (52%), followed by Controllers (50%) and Executives (46%).
- Most common use case: variance analysis
Revenue data quality is the new barrier
- Data issues (23%), security/compliance (21%), and lack of expertise (20%) top the list of obstacles.
- Cost fell dramatically as a concern – from 32% → 14% YoY.
Desired impact of AI in finance
- The #1 outcome: reducing manual errors (29%).
- Others want to speed up the close or free staff for strategic projects.
- Priorities shift by business model:
- SaaS → strategic capacity
- E-commerce → faster insights
- Marketplace → audit readiness
AI is now career currency for rising finance and accounting pros
- 82% believe AI experience is important for advancement; 92% of Executives agree.
Ultimate takeaway: AI adoption is accelerating, but trust in results still depends on the integrity of underlying data. Finance leaders see automation as inevitable – but not yet effortless.
Conclusion
Back to TopThe opportunity ahead
The 2025 survey data makes it clear – automation and AI have matured, but Finance’s future hinges on clean, unified revenue data. Once that’s in place, automation and AI can finally scale accuracy with the business.
The root cause of Finance’s pain is plain to see
- Finance and Accounting teams are struggling to keep up with data quality, business complexity, and staffing.
- Leadership pressure to deliver insights faster further stresses these weak points.
The opportunity is equally clear
- Fixing the data foundation unlocks scalability.
- Reducing errors from manual work is the single biggest opportunity.
- The appetite for AI is stronger than ever – but adoption depends on better data.
The cycle to break
- Poor data → slower execution → more errors → more manual work → less capacity.
- Automation and AI can reverse that loop – if the data layer is solid.
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Our model is straightforward. We collect payment at time of order, and we recognize revenue when the product ships. But our NetSuite setup did not accommodate this process. The disconnect created a lot of complexity we couldn’t afford.Alicia Arntson, CPA VP, Controller, Eight Sleep
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It was taking us 12 to even 15 business days to close the books. By the time we were reviewing results, the business had already moved on.Art Garza Director of Finance, Smokeball
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If I needed something custom in Looker, I had to go through BI. And when numbers didn’t line up, which was too often, I still had to do manual cross‑checks to see why.Brian Cheung Senior Manager, Accounting, GoodRx
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Our months were dominated by manual data tasks. Every month, we had to go download all the payment processor reports, manage five individual workbooks, manipulate the data to get the journal entry that we wanted, and then manually get it into NetSuite.Lindsay Remigio Sr. Manager, Revenue Accounting
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Trying to manually consolidate this level of data was beyond tedious. Inefficiency is one thing, but this process was delaying important business decisions and increasing the risk of mistakes and lengthy audits. That was unacceptable to all of us.Melissa Tuttle Director of Accounting Systems
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We were downloading revenue reports from Looker, pulling Stripe reports separately, and trying to reconcile everything in Excel. Eventually, the Excel files just started crashing.Rebecca Wang VP Finance Corporate Controller, Guideline.
