As CFOs anticipate stronger growth this year, they're looking to deal with that pick-up with fewer resources. Finance chiefs who work with Hackett Group, the benchmarking organization, estimate their companies' revenues will rise 7.9% this year, but say finance operating budgets will decline by 1.5% and the number of full-time finance employees will shrink 0.8%.

“We're in yet another year of companies projecting that their revenue is going to grow—in fact projecting larger growth in 2012 than we've seen over the past couple of years,” says Lynne Schneider, senior research director at Hackett. “And yet finance is not getting any more in absolute terms, which means that in relative terms they have to get more productive.”

The disparity between the expected revenue growth and the decline in finance budgets suggests finance teams will have to realize productivity gains of almost 10%, Schneider says, far above the annual 2% productivity gain Hackett's data suggest is the norm historically.