Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

Financial modelers rank in the top 10%.

9 Oct 2025

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Speaker (Paul Barnhurst) surveys the financial planning/FP&A tooling landscape: notes that a few CRM-like tools (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive) dominate ~90% of that smaller market slice, contrasts that with FP&A where 100+ niche tools exist and no single vendor (outside Excel) owns a majority share. He highlights Excel’s dominance and Microsoft Copilot’s mass-market design (citing large user counts such as ~750 million Excel users), and asserts financial modelers as a profession sit in the top ~10% of Excel expertise compared with other professions.

Questions this video answers

Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive.

Approximately 750 million (speaker gives this as a ballpark figure).

He states financial modelers are in the top 10% of professions for Excel expertise (speaker's claim).

There are basically three tools and almost two that own like 90% of the market. Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive in Europe and then everything else. But go look at an FPA tool for financial planning. Just because of the differences in the industry. There are a hundred plus tools and nobody outside of Excel, which isn't an FP and a tool, but can be used for it, owns the majority of the market. So how much it will consolidate looks like I'm not sure yet. I haven't given that a ton of thought. What I do, I do think and why I think it's important important to attest tools beyond Copilot is Copilot by Microsoft is designed for the masses. There are what, a billion people that use Excel? 750 million. Whatever the number is, it's huge. And are most of those financial modelers? No, they're all kinds of different people. Are financial modelers generally more advanced than finance people in Excel? I'd say on average, as a profession, we're top 10% of the professions out there. Not to say everybody is, but we spend more time in Excel than a lot of areas.