Today’s CFOs are under pressure from every angle: volatile markets, rising costs, ESG reporting, talent shortages, cybersecurity, AI, and constant demands for faster, more accurate insight.

To understand how finance leaders are really coping, AccountsIQ surveyed 1,000 senior finance professionals across the UK and Ireland – CFOs, Finance Directors, Financial Controllers and Heads of Finance – for our latest CFO Mindset Report.

In this webinar, Elaine from AccountsIQ is joined by:

• James Sundin, Co-founder & Chief Evangelist, Represent
• Emma Stora Martin, Head of Sales & Partnerships, ExpenseIn
• James Hunter, CFO, AccountsIQ

Together, they dig into the key findings and what they mean for finance teams in 2025 and beyond.

Topics covered include:

• ERP regret and underutilisation
  • Why 94% of finance leaders who implemented an ERP report some level of regret
  • Long, stressful implementations and projects stretching 7+ months
  • How 60% of respondents use less than half of their ERP’s features
  • The gap between what’s sold in the sales cycle and what’s actually adopted in practice
• Hidden costs in finance software
  • Why 95% of finance leaders have encountered unexpected or “hidden” software costs
  • Extra charges for AI assistants, tools and modules
  • Third-party support costs and surprise price increases
  • How to interrogate pricing, consolidation, multi-entity and approvals costs up front
• Training, onboarding and adoption
  • 36% citing lack of training and support as a key source of ERP regret
  • Why onboarding, customer success and ongoing enablement matter as much as the tech
  • Practical questions to ask about training, support and change management before you buy
• What’s keeping CFOs up at night
  • Real-time access to reliable data and the impact on decision-making
  • Juggling ESG reporting, compliance, cyber risk, rising costs and under-resourced teams
  • Why 65% say decisions are sometimes made without enough data, and 29% say this happens often or always
• AI and automation in the finance function
  • Why AI and automation rank as one of the top drivers of change in finance over the next decade
  • The main AI concerns: ethics, security, data quality and loss of human oversight
  • The drop in fear around AI replacing finance jobs (from 24% to 13%)
  • How vendors like AccountsIQ and ExpenseIn are using AI in practical, auditable ways (OCR, anomaly detection, process automation)
• The “golden middle ground” between entry-level tools and ERP
  • Why many mid-market businesses think they have to jump to a large ERP when they outgrow Sage, Xero or QuickBooks
  • How mid-market cloud finance platforms (like AccountsIQ) can deliver:
    • Multi-entity and multi-currency
    • Consolidation and approvals
    • Advanced reporting and integrations
      — without ERP-level complexity, cost and underutilised modules
  • Why choosing a technology partner, not just a platform, is critical to long-term success

You’ll also hear practical advice on:

• How to challenge implementation timelines and support promises
• How to define what success after go-live actually looks like
• How to prioritise when you’re facing multiple competing issues as a CFO
• Why user adoption is the real driver of ROI for any finance system

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