Dive Brief:
- Rising economic uncertainty fueled by President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff moves is potentially a “good driver of business” for finance software maker OneStream, CFO Bill Koefoed said in an exclusive interview earlier this month.
- The current period can in some ways be likened to the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic threw financial planning and analysis teams into chaos, according to Koefoed.
- “We saw a really big increase in demand during 2020,” the finance chief said. “Today’s world is actually in many cases similar to that.”
Dive Insight:
Birmingham, Michigan-based OneStream saw its total revenues jump to $132.5 million during the fourth quarter of last year, a 29% year over year increase, according to results released last month.
“Overall, despite some near-term headwinds, demand for OneStream remains strong, and we are optimistic heading into the year and remain confident in our long-term opportunity,” CEO Tom Shea said during an earnings call at the time.
The software provider reported a Q4 GAAP operating loss of $47.4 million compared to income of $0.2 million in the year-earlier period, with the company asserting in its Feb. 27 10-K filing that it expects to continue to incur net losses for the “forseeable future as we continue to scale our business.”
The company, which went public last year, offers an artificial intelligence-enabled platform designed to modernize the office of the CFO. Despite the overall Q4 revenue spike, macroeconomic uncertainty caused some company deals to get pushed into the new year, according to Shea.
“It’s a good time for investing in products like ours, but it’s also a big investment, and so uncertainty also impacts that,” Koefoed told CFO Dive. Among other use cases, OneStream’s software helps customers boost their demand forecast accuracy — a capability that is crucial when the environment is constantly in flux, he said.
Economic optimism among finance leaders plummeted in the first quarter of 2025 due to uncertainty over tariffs and concerns about labor needs, according to survey results released by Grant Thornton Monday.
Less than half (47%) of survey respondents were optimistic about the U.S. economy, an unprecedented 21-percentage-point drop from the previous quarter, with pessimism at a 10-quarter high, a report on the findings said.
Amid the anxiety, information technology and digital transformation ranked as CFOs’ highest spending priority for the next six months.
“Digital transformation allows you to be more proactive in terms of scenario planning and how you can cope with this continuing shift of environment,” Paul Melville, Grant Thornton’s CFO advisory services national managing principal, said in the report. “Digital transformation helps you manage some of this.”
Despite the progress that has been made in digital transformation across many front-office and corporate functions, finance departments have historically lagged behind, according to OneStream’s recent 10-K filing.
“Consequently, many Finance organizations continue to rely on legacy systems, some of which were built on decades-old technology and are unable to handle the complexity and volume of data produced by the patchwork of technology applications deployed across the enterprise,” the filing said.
