Mayday vs the 20-day close: How SINE automated month end

SINE is a strategic consultancy and digital agency on a mission to grow the global live experience economy. With a lean finance team and an expanding international footprint, SINE has multiple entities across various currencies.

Felix Matthews, CFO at SINE, leads the finance function’s mission to stay agile and accurate as the business scales.

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Before Mayday: a 20-day close!

For Felix, month end used to be a highly manual, time-consuming process.

“Before Mayday, it was a manual process managed on spreadsheets. A lot of my time was spent maintaining those spreadsheets more than actually doing month-end work.”

Every close involved exporting data from Xero into spreadsheets, updating formulas and adjusting for changes in the chart of accounts.

“There was a lot of exporting, copying, and pasting, then updating whenever we made a change in Xero. It was suboptimal.”

Each entity’s data had to be maintained and reconciled manually, which slowed down progress and created risk every time a change occurred.

Even with a disciplined approach to achieving a hard close, the process was lengthy, taking 20 working days each month!

“It was taking longer than it should have done […] at least 20 working days.”

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Discovering Mayday

As SINE grew, so did its complexity.

The introduction of international subsidiaries and multi-currency loan accounts quickly made it clear that the spreadsheets they had been using would no longer scale.

“I knew our current system wasn’t working. It was too difficult to maintain and it wasn’t scalable.”

Felix began searching for a solution that could deliver both control and scalability, and quickly found that Mayday fit the bill.

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Life with Mayday: a faster, simpler month end

SINE’s journey with Mayday began with Balancer, followed by Recharger.

“I was scratching my head over how to manually reconcile multi-currency loan accounts. It would’ve taken a lot of work in spreadsheets. Mayday’s Balancer module solved that problem really elegantly.”

“Recharger has saved us a huge amount of time. Once the rules are set up, it’s as simple as pushing a button. Even if something changes after the fact, you can reopen, edit, and repost to all entities within Mayday. It’s seamless.”

Together, these tools have significantly reduced manual effort while improving visibility, control and auditability across SINE’s group entities.

Felix estimates that Mayday now saves the finance team over 10 hours each month, a figure that continues to grow as the business expands.

“Mayday enables us to manage increased complexity without additional work. It’s saving us 10 hours a month and growing, and once we’re fully onboarded with Prepayments, that will increase further.”

Looking ahead: building the future of month end

SINE is now in the process of adopting Mayday Prepayments, automating another area of the month-end close that was historically manual and prone to error.

For Felix, the long-term value lies not only in time savings but in Mayday’s broader mission: to build a smarter, more automated month-end process for Xero-based businesses like his.

“I know Mayday’s mission: to mend month end for businesses like mine that use Xero and want to stay on it. I’ve got real faith that they’ll keep identifying the problems finance leaders face and providing elegant solutions to solve them.”

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If Felix’s 20-day close sounds familiar, start your free Mayday trial today and make month end manageable again.