CFOs Forecast Better When Finance Sees More

The 2026 Certainty Project, published in August 2026, reveals that middle-market finance executives in the United States struggle to manage and scale cash flow forecasting, with 62% facing difficulties in this area. This challenge is seen as a symptom of broader issues in the financial information chain, including reconciliation, fragmented data, manual processes, and reporting.

CFOs, controllers, and chief accounting officers view forecasting as the place where weaknesses in financial information become visible, presenting an opportunity for improvement.

Despite not experiencing significant revenue growth, 56% of surveyed businesses still added products or services, expanded supplier bases, increased transaction volumes, and entered new markets. These changes create additional financial events that must be captured, classified, validated, and reconciled. The time gap between transactions and reconciled financial information introduces uncertainty in forecasting models, which require assumptions, information from multiple systems, and spreadsheets to create a current view of the business.

Real-time reporting and reducing manual processes are also among the top priorities for finance leaders, with 35% and 33% of executives, respectively, emphasizing their importance. Standardization, automation, and data integration are among the approaches that yield the strongest benefits as businesses become more complex. The report highlights a multinational payments company operating across 18 countries, where books appeared balanced at the summary level, but transaction-level analysis revealed average FX spreads of about 2%, equivalent to roughly $2 million annually on $100 million in cross-border payments.

The emerging opportunity for finance leaders is not just about closing the books faster but shortening the time between an economic event occurring and finance having a validated, usable understanding of it. By capturing transactions more consistently, reconciling continuously, and providing FP&A with fresher actuals, businesses can reduce assumptions in forecasting and enable faster decision-making.

Establishing a reliable transaction-level foundation first, rather than applying sophisticated intelligence on stale or insufficiently validated data, can help CFOs, controllers, and chief accounting officers act sooner on changes in liquidity, margins, and operating performance.