Finance’s hierarchy of needs — why so many teams never reach self-actualization

For years, the conversation around modern finance teams has centered on strategy. Finance, we’re told, should help shape the company’s direction and drive its growth. I completely agree with this intention. But I also think it glosses over the current reality — finance teams spending most of their time just keeping their bases covered.

I like to relate the demands placed on finance teams to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At the bottom of the pyramid is compliance, filings, tax, and reporting, the day-to-day effort of producing numbers the business trusts. Basic survival. Above that sits the 'safety' layer of data analysis and decision support. At the top, we find our self-actualization needs — strategy, in the form of proactive value creation and financial insights that guide the business.

Finance is increasingly expected to operate at the top of that pyramid — which is where they want to be — while many teams haven’t figured out how to stabilize the bottom.

Getting stuck in survival mode

What keeps most teams from moving upward is not a lack of capability or ambition. It’s time. We spend roughly two-thirds of our week wrangling data and answering questions about how much budget is left. The base layers are critical — the company can face serious legal risks if Finance doesn’t take care of its compliance and reporting needs, and ad hoc requests keep us connected to business units looking for answers and advice — but they eat up most of our capacity before strategy can even enter the picture.

I think this is why so many finance teams feel trapped in a perpetual fire drill. I start every year with a meaningful list of projects that I never finish because every quarter brings a new urgent issue that takes precedence. At any given time, I can think of 20 dashboards I’d like to be building in Planful or Tableau. But the year gets consumed by pipeline reallocations, hiring pressure, and one urgent business problem after another. Important work keeps pushing out proactive, high-value work.

Use automation to move up the pyramid

If finance wants to create more strategic capacity, it needs to liberate the time it spends at the bottom of the pyramid. Automation is the obvious solution here. But before finance teams automate anything, they need a clear view of how their processes work. Does everyone fully understand every single workstream from start to finish, or are certain steps improvised, executed inconsistently, or dependent on institutional knowledge? First, document your processes to spot the inefficiencies. Then, you can figure out how to optimize.

You can implement automation through conventional SaaS, AI-enabled SaaS, or generative AI. The principle is the same, no matter what form you choose — reduce the human effort spent on repetitive work that can be systematized. For example, finance teams might use a SaaS app to set up a commission system that handles calculations, wrangles inputs, and distributes comp statements.

Or, they might implement generative AI tools to help business leaders self-service their ad hoc requests. Imagine a marketing leader asking generative AI whether they are ahead or behind on Q2 program spend and where there may be room to reallocate. Once Marketing gets its basic questions answered, Finance only needs to step in to determine if the budget can and should be reorganized.

Turn time into value, and value into trust

Automation creates more room for top-of-the-pyramid activities, but Finance still has to use that room effectively to elevate its profile and build trust with the rest of the organization. It’s up to us to better understand the business, the market, and to operate more like internal advisors. Speaking the language of the business and proactively adding value is how we’ll answer the call of modern finance.

The challenge of making finance more strategic lies in building a function that has the time and credibility to do so. The business depends on finance to produce compliant, reliable numbers. Then it needs a team with enough agility to support decisions in real time. Only by satisfying its basic survival and safety obligations first can Finance begin to achieve self-actualization.