Why Treasury and FP&A Need a Shared Forecast Model

Published: October 16, 2026

A shared, single source of truth between FP&A and treasury unlocks significant value for both teams, and the wider business. Gurpreet Chaggar, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Prophix, evaluates the barriers and opportunities.

Treasury and FP&A teams are both crucial sides of the same finance coin, but the way they forecast is markedly different. Treasury focuses on cash flow and liquidity, while FP&A tracks profitability, revenues, and expenses. Therefore, it is not unheard of for both teams to operate completely separate data silos and deliver disconnected reports.

With shared forecasting, however, treasury and FP&A provide CFOs with clearer pictures of cash availability and business profitability. FP&A also uses treasury insights to make their projections more accurate, and both can develop more insightful reports.

FP&A Trends (2025) reported that around only 11% of companies have fully aligned their strategic, financial, and operational planning. And 42% point to fragmented processes and a lack of cross-functional alignment as the reason integration efforts fall short. It's clear that a significant number of teams could benefit from a new approach to collaborative forecasting. And many are already feeling the costs of disjointed preparation.

Disconnected planning

When treasury and FP&A run separate forecasting models, disconnects lead to:

• Slow decision-making: Manual data reconciliation and forecast building mean finance delays reacting to shifts in profitability, revenue, and expenditure.
• Poor visibility: When disconnected, FP&A sees only profit and not available liquidity, while treasury has access only to available balances, not business drivers.
• Conflicting calculations and assumptions: Communication and forecasting lag leads to decision-making based on assumptions and outdated information (and treasury and FP&A risk coming to completely different conclusions).
• Missed opportunities: Markets move fast, and disconnected planning leads to cash left uninvested in opportunities and money borrowed unnecessarily.

These are systemic, structural issues, not human inefficiencies. The most diligent FP&A and treasury managers still struggle with lag and visibility issues purely because of the way data is stored, shared, and forecasted.

Reconciliation and consolidation are the work that creates the lag. They can be among the first aspects that AI in FP&A workflows can take off the team. The hours saved can then reappear in interpretation rather than assembly. None of it holds, though, unless both functions can reach the same data. According to the Association for Financial Professionals, around 60% of FP&A professionals cite a lack of data accessibility as a key barrier to using technology effectively. It’s clear, therefore, that collaborating on a unified approach to data management is key if treasury and FP&A intend to unlock technological potential.

Sharing the bigger picture

To balance liquidity, capital strategy, and growth investments effectively, FP&A and treasury teams need to share financial drivers. Liquidity and profit are not the same; they tell two different stories about a business. Treasury supports short-term survival and cash control, while FP&A helps to foster growth and build long-term value.

To grow sustainably, a business will consume available working capital, meaning both sides must see real-time liquidity buffers to achieve their individual goals.

A single revenue forecast helps both teams see clear expectations of where a business is heading in terms of growth and profitability. Meanwhile, sharing drivers produces a common free cash flow view, which then informs how growth can be funded.

Sharing the bigger picture means that treasury and FP&A, for example, clearly see how debt paydown, reinvestment, and shareholder returns interact. They can then align on whether cash goes to debt or to growth.

With greater shared clarity on where capital is allocated, what cash is available, and how much profit is being made, treasury and FP&A proactively inform decision-makers on the most financially viable and potentially profitable projects. With that, not only is the business surviving, it is working to a more sustainable growth trajectory.

Real-time collaboration

Given that treasury and FP&A can be fragmented due to their different focuses, working from the same financial picture can be complex at first. However, the key is to move toward real-time collaboration through a rolling forecasting model.

Both teams should work together on the same planning layer that brings together ERPs, bank feeds, and treasury systems. With all data streams flowing into a single repository as it is received (for example, invoices paid, expenses raised, and live bank APIs), treasury and FP&A move toward rolling forecasting, replacing static cycles that cause lag and restrict decision-making.

Beyond standard 13-week horizons, a continuous forecasting model on a shared platform means that treasury and FP&A always work from the same, actual data breakdowns, and have a clear picture of health and profitability in one place. This makes planning more accurate, relevant, and useful to the wider business.

As IBM’s Teaganne Finn and Ian Smalley state in their March 2026 article, What is a rolling forecast?, rolling forecasts encourage more strategic, driver-based planning, more frequent, actionable insights, and clearer strategic alignment. All three benefits support an improved and sustainable planning relationship between treasury and FP&A.

Barriers vs opportunities

Keeping treasury and FP&A on the same page when forecasting ensures there is always a single, unified answer to CFO questions. Both departments become more agile, openly communicative, and resilient against changes in markets and business trajectories.

For decision-makers, stronger forecasts lead to more efficient, confident choices, measured against clear data-driven reporting. While both treasury and FP&A run critical operations on either side of financial health, it’s never been more important to collaborate on a single source of truth.

A shared data foundation also makes AI adoption possible. KPMG's 2026 survey of more than 1,000 senior finance leaders found active AI use in finance has more than doubled since 2024, from 30% to 75%, with 64% reporting improved forecast accuracy. A significant 36% named data quality as both their highest barrier and their greatest opportunity, which is precisely what a shared forecast addresses.