The State of the Finance Stack 2026: Live Findings

All right, welcome everyone. If you can hear us, if you're out there and you've joined and you can hear us, let us know. We'd love to know where you're coming from in the chat. Let us know your name and where you're coming from. We'll give it a minute or two here before we get started just to let everybody join. But I have here with me Rob. How you doing, Rob?

I'm doing great, Paul. Yeah, it's, uh, it's good to be out here. It's, uh, it's obviously good to, uh, get the chance to talk a little bit about this survey as well. I know it's been in the works for a while, but, uh, Yeah, super excited for today.

Yeah, same here. Excited for this. And we hopefully will hear from some people here in a second and we'll get going. Alrighty, let us know if you can hear us out there. All right, good. It just showed we went live now. I just got the notice on my phone, so we'll give it a minute. I think there's a tiny lag. People will hear that, but we're just going to give it a minute or 2 here for people to get going. Um, in the meantime, I might have to tell a joke. Rob, do you know the difference between an accountant and an FP&A professional?

Uh, I mean, I've got some, uh, some, some thoughts there, but, uh, I don't think anything jumps off right away that, that could be funny.

All right, well, here's the key difference. When an accountant gets creative, They go to jail. When an FP&A professional gets creative, they get promoted. That's why I worked in FP&A.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and that's probably why I stayed away from accounting ever since, uh, basically college. So yeah, I like that a lot.

So there you go. There, there's my way of defining it. Welcome for those that are out there. I saw Peter, you just joined. I think I saw Michael. So we know a few of you can hear us, you're out there. Michael's someone I know from Arizona. We used to be neighbors, so kind of fun to see different people. He's, he's on the accounting side, so I probably just insulted him, but that's okay.

You may have.

All right, well, we'll, we'll go ahead and get started here. So we're gonna share some findings from our Tech Stack Survey. So I'll start by, uh, just turning it over to Rob. I'll let him do a brief intro of himself. I'll introduce myself, then we'll talk a little bit about the survey.

Yeah, yeah, no, thanks a lot, Paul. And, you know, welcome to everyone that's joined. So my name's Rob. I've been in the CFO tech space for about 13, 13 and a half years, but who's counting? I spent a lot of my time in my career working for a software vendor, right? So little different perspectives maybe than some folks that are joining, right, that are maybe users of the software. I used to sell the software, work on it, implement it, etc. So I'm going to try and bring that perspective a little bit. Um, and over the last year, I've been building CFO Shortlist. It's a research and advisory firm, uh, with a lot of what I think is good, uh, material on all the software vendors out there. So, uh, if you're ever interested to, uh, to learn a little bit more, obviously, uh, check it out. But, uh, yeah, really appreciate you having me, uh, uh, Paul.

Alrighty, well, thank you for that, Rob. Appreciate the background. He's done a lot of great work on CFO Shortlist. I've seen the website. If you haven't, check it out. We've had David join us from Kenya. Welcome, David. As you continue to join, just let us know where you're coming from. We'd love to hear from you. Alrighty, so I'll do a quick introduction of myself. My name is Paul Barnhurst. I actually started my career in procurement, surprisingly enough. I don't know how often I say that, but I started working for the Navy Pretty quickly realized writing government contracts is not where I could see myself for the next 30 years. Eventually went back to grad school, got a degree in, uh, information management and an MBA with a specialization in finance. After a couple years, found FP&A and worked in it for about 12 years before starting my own business almost 5 years ago now. I feel old. It will be, uh, 5 years in February. And so I, uh, I do quite a bit around software. I've shared some research reports there on FP&A software. I talk about business partnering and how FP&A should work. I have several courses that I do, training. I even have a few podcasts. So if you haven't, uh, listened, give them a listen. FP&A Unlocked, Financial Modelers Corner, Future Finance. And so that's a little bit about me. But let's go ahead and start with— I'm going to give a little bit of background to the survey. I'm going to open it up. Rob will take us through a couple of the key takeaways, and then Rob and I are each going to share what we thought were some of the most important takeaways. If you haven't downloaded the report, you can go ahead and go to my website and download that. I really encourage you to do that, and you can open it up and see that. I'm going to go ahead and share the report on my screen here. And before we get into the details, just a little bit of this. We conducted the study this year. We started, what was it, about March, March, April?

May have been slightly later. I think we were probably talking about it, but, uh, yeah, around, uh, around that time frame.

Yeah, because I think I did my, uh, my demo days in May, and so I think most the surveys are probably late April, May, June time frame. And so we— it was about 3 months. We have, uh, we ended up with 176 that we used. We probably eliminated 10 or 15, either incomplete or a vendor, uh, completing it multiple times because they wanted to look good, and we figured that didn't help anyone. So those vendors, uh, got eliminated. Uh, we have someone from Warsaw, Poland, so welcome. It says LinkedIn user, not sure the name, but we'll welcome them. So, uh, keep them coming. We got Kenya, we got Arizona,