CPA-only requirements on the wane
- Key insight: Here’s why only 24% of finance organizations still maintain strict CPA-only hiring requirements.
- What’s at stake: Senior managers risk losing up to half their workweeks to disconnected systems.
- Expert quote: “The constraint on finance has shifted from capital to capability,” — Andrej Suskavcevic, Financial Executives International
Only 24% of organizations maintain CPA-only requirements, while the rest are automating, broadening to nontraditional backgrounds or sourcing their talent externally, according to a recent report.
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- 29% say accelerating automation;
- 24% say no change (CPA only);
- 16% say data-centric pivot;
- 14% say expanding non-CPA hiring;
- 14% say strategic sourcing; and
- 3% say enhanced incentives.
Half (50%) of the respondents named the talent and skills gap as the single greatest threat to their function’s stability over the coming year. That’s double the next-ranked concern, shifting regulation (21%), and far ahead of cybersecurity and AI-driven fraud (16%) and macroeconomic volatility (14%).
The cost of that gap shows up in how senior people spend their week. While 36% of organizations report that directors, controllers and senior managers now spend between 31% and 50% of their time firefighting and manually intervening in data. The report calls it “human middleware” between systems that do not talk to each other. Some 40% of the organizations polled run a monthly close of seven days or longer.
“Our members have been telling us this for a while, and now we can put numbers on it: the constraint on finance has shifted from capital to capability,” said Andrej Suskavcevic, president and CEO of Financial Executives International and the Financial Education & Research Foundation, in a statement. “These leaders know exactly what’s wrong with their systems and their close cycle. The trouble is that the people who could fix it are the same people holding it together by hand. That’s fixable, but it starts with measuring how much senior time is going that way.”
The research also finds ambition running well ahead of execution on AI. Over half (53%) of organizations plan to direct a significant or substantial share of their technology budget to AI over the next 12 to 24 months, but only 3% describe AI as a core, strategically integrated part of the function. And 39% are deploying AI tools with no formal framework to measure the impact on finance performance, indicating two in five organizations have no way to tell whether the investment is working.
Reskilling has not kept pace with the risks described by leaders. Only 10% of the survey respondents said they invest aggressively in upskilling their teams and 11% invest nothing at all, even as talent is named the leading threat to the function.
“Ambition isn’t the problem; capacity is,” said Tony Uyehara, executive vice president of Tatum by Randstad, in a statement. “More than half of finance teams are increasing AI spend, but when senior leaders spend half their week acting as human middleware, transformation stalls. The market winners are taking a different route by deliberately buying that capacity back, fixing the underlying data layer, and bringing in expert support to clear the bottleneck.”
The report offers six practical actions for finance leaders, suggesting they measure how much senior-team time goes to reactive work, because that number is what justifies the rest:
1. Measure the “human middleware” burden.
2. Connect the technology roadmap to a talent plan.
3. Establish AI measurement before the next pilot.
4. Fund reskilling commensurate with the stated risk.
5. Plan the parallel-run period of any migration deliberately.
6. Build flexibility into the delivery model.
Introductory bullet points created by AI with editorial review.
