Finance Leaders Eye the Future as Teams Grapple With Manual Challenges
Yooz’s new survey reveals executive confidence in finance jumped while teams report rising manual work constraints.
Today’s most innovative CFOs are embracing Lean Financial Operations, reimagining finance as an architect of growth rather than a gatekeeper of cost. Yet, a new survey from fintech pioneer Yooz reveals these leaders face a critical challenge: while their strategic vision has crystallized dramatically, the operational foundation required to deliver on that vision hasn’t kept pace. Manual processes, document-handling inefficiencies, and approval bottlenecks continue to hold back finance teams from meeting elevated expectations, even as pressure on CFOs intensifies from every direction.
The 2025 Yooz Survey: Leaders vs. Ledger, which compares C-suite and finance staff responses year-over-year, exposes this widening gap at a moment when finance leaders can least afford it. With budget constraints tightening and fraud attempts accelerating, CFOs need every team member operating at full strategic capacity.
The data reveals not a failure of vision or investment, but rather the stubborn persistence of operational waste that prevents finance from becoming the strategic growth engine leaders have fought to establish. The encouraging news: executives and staff agree on the solution, providing a clear mandate for the process-first AI transformation required to close the gap.
Purpose of the Study
In 2024, Yooz’s study revealed a significant perception gap between C-suite leaders and finance teams around priorities, strategic impact, and operational barriers. The 2025 Yooz Survey: Leaders vs. Ledger update revisits these dynamics to understand where expectations and realities have converged or diverged, providing critical guidance for CFOs navigating transformation amid intensifying pressure. Yooz partnered with the third-party survey platform Pollfish in October 2025, surveying 600 U.S. business professionals over the age of 18, comprising 300 C-suite leaders and 300 finance professionals with annual household incomes of at least $50,000.
Key Findings
- Strategic vision achieved broad alignment: Executives rate finance 83% effective (up from 64%), while staff rate effectiveness at 45% (down from 50%).
- Leaders raise the bar for strategic engagement: 44% of leaders expect finance to spend at least half to three-quarters of their time on strategic work up, from 30% of leaders who said the same in 2024.
- Operational waste intensified despite investment: Manual data entry as a barrier rose from 57% to 63% among staff and 54% to 59% among leaders.
- Technology deployment outpaced integration: Executive confidence that technology supports strategy rose from 63% to 72%, while staff confidence dropped from 59% to 54%.
- AI adoption mirrors the broader gap: 28% of staff report not using AI or remaining skeptical compared to just 6% of leaders.
- Document handling remains pre-digital: Leaders reporting 4-6 hours weekly spent tracking down documents jumped from 30% to 41%, with 69% acknowledging at least 4 hours weekly.
- Universal consensus on the solution: Both groups prioritize “improving processes” over hiring, outsourcing, or training.
Vision Is Aligned, Yet Capacity Gaps Persist
Executives and finance teams agree on where finance should focus, but the day-to-day reality reveals a significant capacity problem. The 19-percentage-point jump in how executives rate finance effectiveness shows real progress. Leaders increasingly see finance’s job as business planning and analysis (up from 31% to 45%), not just processing transactions. This marks a major shift in how organizations view what finance should do.
Finance teams share this vision. 40% also see planning and analysis as their main role. The problem isn’t disagreement about where finance should go. It’s that staff can’t get there. While leaders want teams spending 50-75% of time on strategy, only 4% of staff actually work at that level. In fact, 30% spend only 0-25% of their time on strategic work. The issue is outdated workflows, not lack of ambition. Both groups recognize the constraint: 73% of leaders and 69% of staff say manual, repetitive tasks limit strategic impact moderately to extremely.
New Technology Meets Old Processes
Finance leaders have made progress securing technology investments. Executive perception that technology supports strategy jumped from 63% to 72%, and automation satisfaction rose from 69% to 72%. At the leadership level, new dashboards and analytical tools are delivering genuine value.
But the view from the front lines tells a different story. Staff automation satisfaction fell from 57% to 46%, and their perception of technology support dropped from 59% to 54%, an 18-percentage-point gap with leadership. Why? Leaders interact with technology through improved dashboards and reports. Staff interact with it at the transaction level, where they encounter partial automation, integration problems, and manual workarounds that new systems were supposed to eliminate.
AI adoption follows the same pattern. Both executives and staff see AI’s promise for automating repetitive work and improving forecasting. Yet 28% of staff report not using AI at all, compared to just 6% of leaders.
Manual Work Gets Worse, Not Better
Manual work has intensified. Staff citing manual data entry as a top barrier rose from 57% to 63%. Leaders saw the same trend, jumping from 54% to 59%. Even more telling, the percentage of executives reporting their teams spend 4-6 hours per week chasing down documents surged from 30% to 41%. That’s 69% of leaders acknowledging their teams lose at least four hours weekly to document hunting, time that could be spent on strategic analysis. Despite automation investments, only 39% of leaders estimate more than half of daily tasks are actually automated and just 28% of staff report that level of automation.
Why does manual work persist when organizations are investing heavily in automation? The answer reveals a critical misstep. Many organizations are layering new technology onto old processes instead of redesigning workflows from scratch. The result? They’re automating inefficiency rather than eliminating waste at the root. Until finance leaders attack the underlying processes first, technology investments will continue to deliver modest gains while teams remain buried in manual work.
The Mandate: Choose Technology That Eliminates Waste
The survey’s most encouraging finding is that everyone agrees on the answer. Both executives and staff rank process improvement as the top solution. This beats hiring more people, outsourcing, or simply adding more technology tools. They also agree automation is critical: 83% of leaders and 80% of staff rate it as moderately to absolutely critical for strategic partnership.
This consensus creates a clear mandate for CFOs: choose technology that attacks waste at the root rather than automating broken workflows. Best-in-class platforms redesign processes as part of implementation by eliminating manual touchpoints, streamlining document handling, and removing approval bottlenecks through intelligent automation. This approach delivers multiple wins: it frees existing staff for strategic work, reduces fraud vulnerability, and ensures far better returns on technology investments than “good enough” ERP modules that leave underlying inefficiencies in place.
The business case is compelling and quantifiable. 69% of leaders say their teams spend at least 4 hours weekly tracking down documents and approvals. Nearly half of staff (47%) cite clunky approval processes as a top barrier to strategic work. This isn’t unavoidable overhead; it’s entirely eliminable waste. The right technology platform with digitized document repositories, searchable archives, and intelligent workflow routing can recover these lost hours while simultaneously improving control and visibility. The opportunity is clear. What matters now is choosing solutions designed for operational excellence, not just automation.
The Path to Lean Financial Operations
Yooz CEO Laurent Charpentier noted, “Today’s most innovative CFOs have successfully elevated finance from cost gatekeeper to growth architect, but they’re being held back by operational waste. Our survey reveals something powerful: executives and staff are fully aligned on the solution. Attack waste at the root through process excellence, then deploy intelligent automation. The organizations that embrace Lean Financial Operations™ will unlock the strategic capacity they’ve been fighting for.”
CFOs now have their roadmap. Finance leaders who embrace Lean Financial Operations will transform finance into the growth engine their organizations need. This means choosing platforms designed to eliminate waste at the root, not just automate it. They’ll recover the hours lost to document chasing and manual data entry, redeploy that capacity to growth planning and risk analysis, and deliver the agility CEOs demand. For finance leaders ready to close the gap, the principle is clear: operational excellence isn’t a back-office concern. It’s the foundation for strategic finance.