If There Was a Word of the Year for Accounting: Financial Transformation
Published on TenKey.ai on March 31, 2026
Where the Term Is Coming From
A few months ago, I was talking with a partner at PwC I used to work for. We had gotten mixed reactions regarding focusing on Accounts Payable, some thought it was solved, and others said “You have to start with Accounts Receivable.” We asked for his thoughts and were bracing for him to tell us AP was a waste of time, “Revenue is king,” and to start with Accounts Receivable.
He took it in a different direction almost immediately. His point was that right now, the specific workflow matters less than how you position the outcome. In his words:
If you can credibly say your product drives Financial Transformation and reduces the amount of manual work in finance, it will sell. It does not really matter if you start in AP, AR, or somewhere else in the stack.
At first, I was like okay, maybe, but that sounds like a total buzzword. Most of us don’t wake up thinking about “financial transformation.” We think about getting the numbers right, closing on time, and not having to explain the same variance three months in a row. But the more accounting teams we work with, the more I think he was describing something very real.
What the Work Actually Looks Like
If you spend time inside an accounting team, the problem is not hard to find. It’s not that we don’t have tools. It’s that the work itself is stitched together across systems that don’t line up cleanly.
Very little time is spent on straightforward execution. The majority of the effort goes into figuring out why things don’t match. You’re pulling data from the ERP, comparing it to something in billing, checking cash somewhere else, and trying to reconcile all of it into a version of the truth that you’re comfortable signing your name to.
A lot of that work is invisible if you haven’t done it. It shows up as small things. Following up with another team to understand a number. Building a quick model to isolate a discrepancy. Re-running a report because something feels off. It adds up quickly.
Finance teams spend around 60 percent of their time on data gathering and reconciliation. The work is less about processing and more about connecting.
The Cost of Operating This Way
The way this work is structured creates a built-in delay. Something happens in the business, and then finance works backward to understand it. The close becomes the point where everything gets pulled together.
If you’ve been through enough closes, you know how that feels. There’s always a moment where you’re confident in the numbers, but it comes after a lot of effort, and usually later than anyone would like.
That delay carries into everything else. Forecasts are built on numbers that are already a step behind. Decisions get made with partial context, especially in fast-moving parts of the business.
Companies with more timely financial visibility tend to perform better, particularly on margins and forecasting accuracy. That lines up with intuition. If you understand what’s happening earlier, you have more options.
What Financial Transformation Actually Means
This is where the phrase starts to make more sense to me.
If you strip it down, financial transformation is about reducing the amount of work required to understand what actually happened in the business. Not just speeding up tasks, but reducing the need for someone to manually connect everything.
A lot of what gets labeled as transformation today doesn’t really do that. It makes individual steps better, faster invoice processing, cleaner approvals, nicer dashboards. But the underlying structure stays the same.
The more interesting changes are the ones that start to take that responsibility away from people and put it into the system.
Where the Shift Is Actually Happening
Variance analysis is a good example because everyone has done it. You run a report, see something that doesn’t make sense, and then you start digging. You look at transactions, compare periods, maybe talk to someone in another team, and eventually you figure out what drove the change.
That process is not complicated, but it is time-consuming and it depends heavily on knowing where to look.
Instead of building the explanation from scratch, you’re validating and refining it.
You see the same pattern in reconciliations and forecasting. Issues get identified earlier, closer to when they happen. Forecasts update based on actual activity instead of being rebuilt on a schedule. The common thread is less manual coordination.
Why the Headcount Conversation Comes Up
The PwC partner framed this in terms of headcount, which is how a lot of executives think about it. There is some truth there. If you remove enough manual work, you can support the same business with fewer people. But I don’t think that’s the most interesting way to look at it.
What actually changes is how time is spent. When you’re not constantly pulling data and reconciling differences, you have more capacity to focus on what the numbers mean. That’s where finance can actually add value.
It also makes the function easier to scale. As the business grows and complexity increases, you don’t have to add people at the same rate just to keep up with the mechanics.
How I Think About Approaching It
If I were approaching this inside a company, I wouldn’t start with a tool. I would start with a workflow that everyone knows is painful.
Accounts Payable is an obvious one. Bank reconciliations is another. Close for sure. Pick something where you consistently see people chasing information and trying to reconcile differences. Map out what actually happens, where data is coming from, where things break down, and where people have to manually figure things out.
Not just automating a step, but reducing the need for someone to coordinate across the entire process.
That framing usually leads to better decisions about what to build or buy, because it’s grounded in how the work actually happens.
What Changes When It Works
When you get this right, the impact is pretty noticeable. Close becomes less chaotic because fewer issues pile up at the end. Forecasts feel more connected to what’s actually happening in the business. Conversations shift away from debating numbers and toward understanding them. Finance starts to feel less like a reporting function and more like part of how the company operates day to day.
Why the Term Will Stick
I still think the phrase financial transformation is a bit overused, and it will probably get stretched to cover a lot of things that don’t fully deserve it. But the underlying shift is real.
The way we’ve historically done this work, with people acting as the connective layer between systems, does not scale well with the complexity of modern businesses. Something has to change. The market has already decided this is important. Products that can show they reduce manual work and help finance operate more efficiently will continue to gain traction.