In a Third of Finance Teams, Senior Staff Lose Up to Half the Week to Manual Data Work

Talent, not technology, is the binding constraint: one in two finance leaders surveyed ranks the skills gap as their top risk, double the next-ranked concern

MORRISTOWN, N.J., Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Finance organizations entering 2027 have plenty of transformation plans and too few people to execute them, according to the 2026 Finance Architecture Survey, released today by the Financial Education & Research Foundation (FERF), the research affiliate of Financial Executives International (FEI), with sponsorship from Randstad USA.

The study of 116 senior-level finance and accounting executives (CFOs, controllers, chief accounting officers and finance VPs, predominantly at U.S. organizations) found that half of respondents named the talent and skills gap as the single greatest threat to their function's stability over the coming year. That is double the next-ranked concern, shifting regulation (21%), and well ahead of cybersecurity and AI-driven fraud (16%) and macroeconomic volatility (14%).

The cost of that gap shows up in how senior people spend their week. Thirty-six percent of organizations report that directors, controllers and senior managers now spend between 31% and 50% of their time firefighting and manually intervening in data. The report has a name for it: "human middleware" between systems that do not talk to each other. Forty percent run a monthly close of seven days or longer.

"Our members have been telling us this for a while, and now we can put numbers on it: the constraint on finance has shifted from capital to capability. These leaders know exactly what's wrong with their systems and their close cycle. The trouble is that the people who could fix it are the same people holding it together by hand. That's fixable, but it starts with measuring how much senior time is going that way."

— Andrej Suskavcevic, President and Chief Executive Officer, Financial Executives International and the Financial Education & Research Foundation

The research also finds ambition running well ahead of execution on AI. Fifty-three percent of organizations plan to direct a significant or substantial share of their technology budget to AI over the next 12 to 24 months, but only 3% describe AI as a core, strategically integrated part of the function. And 39% are deploying AI tools with no formal framework to measure the impact on finance performance, meaning two in five organizations have no way to tell whether the investment is working.

Reskilling has not kept pace with the risk leaders describe. Only 10% invest aggressively in upskilling their teams and 11% invest nothing at all, even as talent is named the leading threat to the function.

"Ambition isn't the problem; capacity is. More than half of finance teams are increasing AI spend, but when senior leaders spend half their week acting as human middleware, transformation stalls. The market winners are taking a different route by deliberately buying that capacity back, fixing the underlying data layer, and bringing in expert support to clear the bottleneck."

— Tony Uyehara, Executive Vice President, Tatum by Randstad

The report closes with six practical actions for finance leaders. The first is to measure how much senior-team time goes to reactive work, because that number is what justifies the rest.

Availability
The 2026 Finance Architecture Survey Report is available here or at www.financialexecutives.org/research. FERF will host a webinar on the findings on Tuesday, November 3, 2026 at 2:00 pm ET; registration is open here.

About FERF
The Financial Education & Research Foundation (FERF) is the independent, non-profit research affiliate of Financial Executives International. FERF produces objective, practitioner-focused research for senior financial executives. FERF has retained full editorial control over this report; sponsorship does not constitute endorsement of any product or service.

About Randstad USA
Randstad is the world's leading talent company and a partner of choice to talent and clients. We are committed to providing equitable opportunities to people from all backgrounds and help them remain relevant in the rapidly changing world of work. We have a deep understanding of the labor market and help our clients to create the high-quality, diverse and agile workforces they need to succeed. Randstad was founded in 1960 and is headquartered in Diemen, the Netherlands.

SOURCE Financial Executives International (FEI)