The pace of business has quickened, and with it the cost of not paying attention. Drive faster and you have to look further down the road for the first sign of trouble; fail to look far enough ahead and the unexpected arrives with far less warning than it used to. Finance functions are no different. The businesses that get caught out aren’t usually the ones that made a bad call, they’re the ones that never made a call at all. In this article we examine the hight cost of doing nothing and the unfortunate business fallout.
When standing still catches up
GAME, once the UK’s biggest video games retailer with hundreds of stores, watched its market move steadily onto digital downloads and streaming for well over a decade but still kept selling discs. It collapsed into administration in April 2026 owing £15.8 million, brought down not by one bad decision but by a decade of never quite catching up, including a 2024 call to stop taking trade-ins that quietly cut off one of the few revenue lines still working. Claire’s, the accessories chain went back into administration for the second time in under two years in January 2026, its owner concluding the business had “no realistic possibility of trading profitably again” after high-street decline and rising costs it had never quite adapted to the first time round. Every one of these businesses had a moment where continuing as they were felt like the safe option. Every one of them found out it wasn’t.
Why doing nothing feels like the safe option
No organisation sets out to fall behind. But culture and structure both make standing still feel like the responsible choice, and change feel like the risky one. A recent survey of UK retailers found that 35% cite return on investment as their main barrier to digital change, 33% point to legacy systems, and nearly a quarter say it’s simply a lack of leadership appetite to back the case. None of those are irrational reasons on their own. Together, they describe an organisation that keeps comparing the cost of change against zero, rather than against the cost of not changing.
That comparison is the whole problem. A new platform, a transformation project, an extra analyst, all of that gets costed carefully, scrutinised, and measured for ROI. The cost of leaving things exactly as they are almost never gets the same treatment, because it’s harder to put a number on a decision that was never actually made. Bad decisions get a post-mortem. No decision rarely does, because there’s no single moment to point to and no one person to hold accountable, just a slow accumulation of a business quietly falling behind the one that didn’t stand still.
What standing still actually costs finance
Finance has historically felt insulated from this – less exposed to markets than sales or product, used to long hours and thin resourcing as simply the cost of doing the job. That insulation is largely gone. The tools finance still leans on, and the gap between what the role now demands and what a spreadsheet can deliver, have made the cost of inaction concrete and measurable.
Start with forecasting. Around 64% of finance leaders say manual, day-to-day tasks are what’s limiting the time available for actual planning and analysis, which means the team producing the numbers has less and less capacity left to interpret them. That gap only gets more expensive as the business demands forecasts more often and with more scenarios attached, because a process built around manual rebuilds simply cannot keep pace with a request for “what if” delivered the same afternoon it’s asked.
Then there’s trust in the numbers themselves. Nearly 40% of CFOs say they don’t completely trust their own organisation’s financial data, with fragmented data sources and spreadsheet dependency cited as the two biggest reasons why, and separately, 98% of finance leaders admit they lack full confidence in their cash flow visibility. A forecast nobody quite believes doesn’t get acted on; it gets quietly discounted, and the decisions that should have been based on it get made on gut feel instead.
Reporting has the same problem in a different shape. Finance functions increasingly serve an audience well beyond finance, operational leaders, non-executive directors, external investors who are often no longer even in the same country and a dense workbook of formulas doesn’t travel to any of them. A report nobody outside finance can read is a report that leaves the wider business making decisions without the information finance spent hours producing.
That same fragility shows up as a people risk, too. Huge, business-critical models are still routinely held together by a small number of specialists who understand exactly why a particular adjustment sits where it does, knowledge that lives in someone’s head rather than anywhere documented. It’s a single point of failure hiding in plain sight, and it’s compounded by a genuine skills gap: 62% of CFOs now cite a digital skills gap within their own finance team, which is precisely the gap that makes people want to leave for somewhere better equipped, and makes it harder to hire their replacement.
And underneath all of it sits the original risk: the one a slow, manual, spreadsheet-bound process is worst equipped to catch. Scenario modelling that takes days to rebuild for every “what if” isn’t scenario modelling in any environment where conditions can shift week to week. It’s exactly the kind of blind spot that turned a market shift into a GAME moment, the change was visible for anyone modelling far enough ahead to see it. The businesses that saw it coming were the ones whose systems could actually run the scenario in time to act on it.
The comfort blanket that isn’t
None of this is really about spreadsheets versus software. It’s about recognising that the status quo has a cost, even though nobody sends an invoice for it. Every quarter spent on the current process is a quarter of slower forecasts, less-trusted numbers, reports that go unread, and risk sitting a beat too long before anyone notices it. That cost compounds quietly, which is exactly what makes it so easy to ignore and so expensive to eventually correct.
This is precisely the gap that modern planning platforms exist to close, which is a large part of why Jedox has been consistently recognised as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Financial Planning Software: connected data instead of fragmented spreadsheets, forecasts that update in hours instead of weeks, and scenario modelling fast enough to actually inform a decision before the moment for it has passed.
So the next time a transformation business case gets compared against doing nothing, it’s worth asking what “nothing” is actually costing. Doing nothing was never the comfort blanket it looked like. It was just the cost nobody had measured yet.
About Kybos
Kybos is a dedicated UK & Ireland Jedox Platinum partner. We build planning and analysis solutions that deliver value fast using accountancy qualified consultants. Whether you want a fully customised application or to build upon an existing solution, Kybos consultants are here to help.