How HFL Education left NetSuite behind and cut deferred income work by 80%

HFL Education spent six years and invested heavily in a NetSuite setup that failed to deliver the value it promised. CFO Andrew Griffiths explains how the finance team moved to Xero, Mayday and a best-of-breed stack in two months, and why deferred income now takes a fifth of the effort.

"As soon as we saw Mayday, everything clicked. This is how simple deferred income can be." Andrew Griffiths, CFO, HFL Education

At a glance

• Company: HFL Education, a not-for-profit schools company owned by Hertfordshire schools and Hertfordshire County Council
• Size: Over £20M turnover, around 10,000 customers, a finance team of seven
• Before: Legacy council SAP, then six years on NetSuite
• After: Xero, Mayday, ApprovalMax and Apron
• Mayday products: Deferred Revenue and Prepayments
• Results: Deferred income work cut to around 20% of the previous effort, auditors working from a single Mayday schedule, and a fully loaded tech stack costing roughly what HFL used to pay its NetSuite partner alone

From council SAP to an ERP built for growth

HFL was spun out of Hertfordshire County Council around 14 years ago. It was already selling services to schools, so the model transferred neatly into a trading company. Andy helped write the original business case and has been with HFL since. The company is not for profit in ethos, and by its Articles its only eligible shareholders are Hertfordshire schools and the local authority.

That history created a cultural challenge. Staff who had worked in local government now had to think about P&Ls, balance sheets and debtor recovery. The finance systems needed to catch up too. For its first five years, HFL stayed on the council's ageing SAP system and paid the council well for the privilege.

When it came to replacing SAP, Andy looked at Xero, but the tech stack around it wasn't mature enough at the time. As a company fully owned by the public sector, HFL also had to run a full EU procurement: a detailed specification, published on government portals, with a consultant brought in to guide the process. The leadership at the time saw an ERP as the engine for growth. NetSuite won.

"We were sold everything. It was going to be really good value based on the benefits we believed it would deliver," says Andy.

A six-figure commitment, only partly used

Following the procurement exercise, HFL made an annual six-figure commitment to NetSuite for a breadth of functionality it ultimately didn't use in full.

The software was six figures a year on a five-year contract. HFL's NetSuite partner took an upfront fee and an annual retainer, which Andy eventually negotiated down by half. Over five years, and including implementation costs, the investment in NetSuite came close to seven figures.

The growth HFL had paid for failed to materialise. Education customers are loyal, dislike cold calls and buy on trust and reputation, so the CRM functionality was of little benefit. The time-tracking functionality was not widely adopted. "We were massively overpaying for functionality," says Andy. "We'd specced out initially thinking it would drive the company forward."

Some of the system was used, just not usefully. HFL was loading multiple KPIs against every school customer. The data was rarely visited in NetSuite, which meant a data maintenance cost that did not deliver a return. "We ended up spending a lot of money on a system that we didn't fully benefit from," Andy says.

Deferred income: the job NetSuite made hardest

HFL sells a lot of training and programmes of work in advance, so the finance team has to recognise that income in the right month as services are delivered. With hundreds of new invoices each month and thousands of lines on the deferred income schedule, this is one of the most important processes in HFL's month end.

In NetSuite, it was also one of the most painful. The revenue recognition process was cumbersome and still needed manual work alongside it. When it came to the annual company audit, the finance team spent a long time with the audit team just explaining how an invoice flowed through to the P&L. Andy shared the auditors' blunt verdict: the NetSuite setup was horribly complicated.

The renewal that made the decision

By the time HFL's five-year NetSuite contract came up for its sixth-year renewal, Andy had already cut the number of users to a third. He expected the bill to fall accordingly. It didn't. NetSuite wouldn't go below six figures a year, most of which was a fixed "premium cloud service" charge that stayed the same however few people used the system.

"It was that first renewal for the sixth year that just made me think, we've got to move away from this," says Andy. "From the approach of the NetSuite account team, it was clear that the Oracle values were incompatible with our core purpose as a not-for-profit company."

The auditors pointed the way

The company auditors, Hillier Hopkins, didn't only flag the problem. They told Andy they thought HFL could work well on Xero plus a few apps. The firm had also started looking at Mayday for its own work and liked what it saw. "We followed their lead," says Andy. "They effectively introduced us to Mayday as a product."

HFL's financial controller asked the right question before committing: would a multi-app stack leave the team jumping between tabs all day? Once she saw how closely the tools integrated with Xero, she was convinced. Andy now describes the stack as "so much more intuitive" than what came before.

Xero and a modular stack were looking more and more compelling, but it meant a different way of thinking after years of an all-in-one ERP. Hein van Zyl, HFL's first contact at Mayday, started by asking how the team worked. "He wanted to listen to understand how we wanted to use it," says Andy. "It just seemed quite refreshing, compared to the way we'd struggled to work with NetSuite." Hein then introduced Andy to Perry Farrell, Financial Controller at AEI Music and a member of CFO Techstack's Finance Leader Advisory Council. Perry had already moved AEI Music from Sage Intacct to Xero, Mayday and a best-of-breed stack, and hearing first hand how it had gone gave Andy and his team the confidence to commit.

HFL tested Mayday against two other deferred income tools, and the deciding factors were volume and functionality. In testing, the team found they could pull in hundreds of invoices each month and apply deferral rules easily, with Mayday reading each invoice and suggesting the months to defer across. The alternatives weren't as well set up for that volume. "As soon as we saw Mayday, everything clicked," says Andy. "This is how simple deferred income can be."

HFL brought in Raz Miah at Sopher & Co as a sounding board along the way. It was "useful to have him there, making sure that we were making the right decisions," says Andy.

How deferred revenue works in Mayday

Mayday's AI scans your Xero transactions and flags the invoices that need a deferred revenue schedule. It reads each invoice to suggest the months to defer across and recommends a schedule, which you can review and edit. That works at volume, whether you're processing ten invoices a month or hundreds.

You then see every schedule for the period in one view, approve it, and post the journals to Xero in a single click, at transaction or nominal level. The schedule becomes your single source of truth for what's been recognised, what's still deferred and what will hit the P&L in future months.

A two-month exit against the clock

HFL committed to the move in autumn 2025. Then NetSuite added one final cost: a mid five-figure fee for a read-only licence, so the auditors could access the data for the year-end audit.

Rather than pay it, the team planned around it, with helpful input from the audit team at Hillier Hopkins LLP. They stopped transacting in NetSuite at the end of January, had the auditors in during March to audit the first ten months of the year, downloaded everything they needed from NetSuite and stopped using it before the March year end. From 1 February 2026, HFL was running on Xero, Mayday, ApprovalMax and Apron.

The team prepared without formal training. They bought test licences for Xero and Mayday, set up test companies, loaded the chart of accounts and ran a full month of December invoices through the new stack before go-live. "We were able to check our processes, understand how it worked before we'd actually transitioned," says Andy. "Better than just being trained in something."

Go-live was quiet. "The team were a bit deflated in week one, because everything was just going to plan," says Andy. "They thought it'd be exciting, we'd be trying to problem-solve the whole time, but it all just worked incredibly smoothly."

"Mayday does it exactly how we need it"

Deferred income at a fifth of the effort

"The work we have to do on deferred income is probably a fifth, 20% of what we used to have to wrestle with," says Andy. Mayday replaced both the NetSuite process and the manual work alongside it, and HFL now uses Mayday for prepayments as well.

The year-end audit changed completely. Previously, auditors sat at desks watching the team step through NetSuite. For the February and March audit work, the Mayday deferred income schedule was great audit evidence. "When we showed the auditors the Mayday deferred income schedule, they were happy doing their work off that," says Andy.

With one source for deferred income, the team also has better insight. They can see clearly what income will drop into the P&L in future months.

A better experience across the business

HFL's 40 budget holders no longer need NetSuite training to approve a purchase order. They get an email from ApprovalMax, click the link and approve. HFL's IT team replaced another part of NetSuite, time and project tracking, with an in-house Power App, which staff find easier to use. Andy says the finance team is noticeably more positive, spending less time on transactional processes and more on work that adds value.

Money literally back into helping children

HFL's fully loaded tech stack, including Xero, Mayday and its other apps, now costs roughly what it was paying its NetSuite partner alone by the end.

For a not-for-profit owned by schools, that matters. "Everyone is very, very pleased that we're saving such a lot of money that gets re-invested into the front-facing services for schools," says Andy, "rather than going to a big multinational tech company."

Asked how he'd describe Mayday to a peer, Andy calls it "a very intuitive and accessible application, integrating perfectly with Xero," backed by responsive customer service he didn't expect at the price.

What's next

HFL runs a single entity with more than 50 business units, and Andy wants to bring more of month end into Mayday. Month-end accruals and overhead allocations across those business units are next on the list to explore.

Looking back, he's candid about the NetSuite years. "It makes you wonder why we spent so long and so much money on the previous one. But life's one learning, isn't it?"

Thinking about leaving your ERP, or trying to avoid one? Do what HFL did: start a free 30-day trial, set up a test company and run a month of your own transactions through Mayday.

‍