How Creative CFO stopped losing days to intercompany reconciliations

July 24, 2026

About Creative CFO

Creative CFO builds fractional finance teams for high-growth SMEs. Rather than hiring a single bookkeeper, or sending the work off to a faceless firm, its customers get a full finance team that plugs in alongside their own - part theirs, part Creative CFO's, fully integrated. The firm doesn't position itself as a traditional accountant, and doesn't try to.

The Atlas Titans team, led by Financial Manager Chloe Sloane, works across a book of SME customers spanning different industries and geographies. A good number of them are groups - and groups are where this story starts.

"Creative CFO builds fractional finance teams for high-growth SMEs. Our customers get a full finance team that plugs in alongside their own. Part theirs, part ours, fully integrated. We're not traditional accountants and we don't try to be."‍

- Chloe Sloane, Financial Manager, Creative CFO

The challenge: the problem nobody puts on a slide

Intercompany loan reconciliation is not the kind of task anyone puts on a slide. It doesn't win new work, it doesn't show up in a pitch, and no founder has ever asked for more of it. But for a group finance team it's one of the unglamorous costs of month-end, and for years it was one of the biggest time sinks in Creative CFO's close.

The difficulty compounds the moment the entities involved sit in different functional currencies that roll up into a single reporting currency. Cash moves between entities that should tie out to the cent, and sometimes it simply doesn't. Before the team could even reach the interest recalculations and FX revaluations, they had to find the break.

"We'd spend hours, sometimes days, hunting for the one missing transaction before we could even start on interest recalculations and FX revaluations."

Audit made the same bottleneck resurface. Every audit needed an intercompany matrix that tied out cleanly, and getting there meant working through the whole process again, just to hand the auditors what they already expected to see.

The workaround they weren't proud of

For a long time, the answer was a Google Sheet - fed by pulls from every entity, summarised with a wall of XLOOKUP formulas on a dashboard tab, and a dropdown to flick between periods. It worked, until it didn't.

"One deleted cell, or one small formatting slip, and the whole sheet was unusable. From there you were back to hunting for the break by hand, comparing two large datasets side by side to work out what had changed. We'd built a tool to save time that, on a bad day, cost us more than the manual process it replaced."

If you've ever inherited a spreadsheet like that, you know the feeling.

The solution: Mayday cuts straight through the search

For group customers with multiple functional currencies and a single reporting currency, the hardest part of the close used to be simply working out where the intercompany balances broke.

‍Mayday finds the needle in the haystack - so the team's time goes to the analysis that matters, instead of the hunt that used to eat the day before it.

Mayday automates intercompany loan reconciliation end to end, along with intercompany accounts payable and receivable. What used to mean downloading multiple spreadsheets and consolidating them into a single workbook is now a few clicks. The team has stopped building slack into the timetable for "what if the sheet breaks," because it doesn't - and that alone has given back hours every month, hours that now go to the parts of the close that need an accountant's judgement rather than a formula fix.

Before Mayday

One deleted cell or a formatting slip and the whole sheet was unusable. Back to hunting for the break, comparing two large datasets side by side to find what changed.

With Mayday

Reconciliation across entities is automated and integrated. No spreadsheet to break, no manual comparison, no more searching for the one thing that's off.

The features the team reaches for

There's plenty in the platform, but three earn their place every single month:

  • Balancer - the team's favourite by a distance. It solved one of their biggest month-end bottlenecks outright.
  • Native Xero integration - one click and they're back in Xero, looking at the source data, with no exporting and no second-guessing.
  • Exportable intercompany matrix - a downloadable PDF or Excel matrix that goes straight to an auditor, alongside read-only Xero access.

No fireworks, just "of course"

People sometimes ask whether there was an aha moment. There wasn't a dramatic one - it was more immediate than that.

"The first time we ran it, the reaction was simply: of course this works, why doesn't everyone do it this way? It solved something we'd been managing around for years, and it did it from the first login. Some of the best tools are the ones that feel obvious in hindsight."

Why it matters

The reason a problem this small is worth caring about is what it frees up. Every hour spent chasing a missing transaction is an hour not spent on the work customers actually need: the judgement calls, the forward view, the conversations that move a business.

"Our mission is to build the world's best finance teams, and part of that is clearing the low-value grind out of the way so the high-value thinking has room to happen. Intercompany reconciliation was a piece of that grind. Now it's a few clicks, and we've got the time back."

Try Mayday for yourself

Mayday reduces the month-end process from days to hours for both single and multi-entity organisations.

‍