CFOs Forecast Better When Finance Sees More

The competitive advantage today isn’t forecasting tomorrow’s cash more accurately. It’s having less of today’s cash left to forecast.

Data in the August 2026 edition of The 2026 Certainty Project, a PYMNTS Intelligence report in collaboration with Fynapse, shows that 62% of middle-market finance executives have struggled to manage or scale cash flow forecasting, while 37% identify it as their single biggest finance or back-office challenge.

And viewed alongside the other pressures facing finance leaders such as reconciliation, fragmented data, manual processes and reporting, forecasting starts to look less like an isolated FP&A problem and more like the place where weaknesses in the financial information chain finally become visible.

For CFOs, controllers and chief accounting officers, that creates a bigger opportunity. Improve the infrastructure that turns transactions into trusted financial information, and the payoff can travel across the finance organization: a cleaner close, more current reporting, better forecasts and ultimately faster decisions.

CFOs Capture Better Financial Forecasting by Starting Earlier Than the Forecast

Companies don’t have to grow dramatically for their finance operations to become more complicated. Among businesses in the PYMNTS Intelligence and Fynapse study that did not increase revenue over the previous two years, 56% still added products or services, 48% expanded their supplier bases, 40% increased transaction volumes and 24% entered new markets.

Every one of those changes creates additional financial events that accounting must capture, classify, validate and reconcile. When transactions take days to become reconciled financial information, forecasting models have to compensate for the gap. Teams introduce assumptions, pull information from multiple systems and use spreadsheets to construct a current view of the business that the accounting infrastructure cannot yet provide.

Reduce that latency and something important happens: finance has less uncertainty to forecast. This makes a faster close just the beginning.

After all, cash flow forecasting ranked as the top investment priority among surveyed executives, cited by 52%. But real-time reporting followed at 35%, reducing manual processes at 33% and unifying finance data at 32%. Standardization, automation and data integration were also among the approaches producing the strongest benefits as businesses became more complex.

Consider the difference between balanced books and usable financial visibility. The report highlighted a multinational payments company operating across 18 countries whose books appeared balanced at the summary level. Transaction-level analysis, however, subsequently revealed average FX spreads of roughly 2% — equivalent to about $2 million annually on $100 million of cross-border payments.

Read the report: Growth and Scaling: The Corporate Finance Inflection Point

Nothing necessarily had to be “wrong” with the accounting for economically important information to remain hidden. For controllers and financial reporting leaders, the emerging opportunity is therefore not simply closing the books faster. It is shortening the time between an economic event occurring and finance having a validated, usable understanding of it.

Capture transactions more consistently and reconciliation becomes easier. Reconcile continuously and reporting becomes more current. Give FP&A fresher actuals and forecasts require fewer assumptions about the present. And if firms give CFOs both, then management can respond sooner to changes in liquidity, margins and operating performance.

That also helps establish an important prerequisite for the next generation of finance technology. AI can generate scenarios, detect anomalies and accelerate analysis. But sophisticated models operating on stale, fragmented or insufficiently validated transaction data simply move uncertainty through the organization faster.

The higher-return sequence may be the reverse: establish a reliable transaction-level foundation first, then apply increasingly sophisticated intelligence on top of it. When accounting knows sooner what has happened, reporting can explain the business sooner, FP&A can see where it is going sooner, and CFOs can act sooner.

At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.

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