Introducing Harris Real Estate

Harris Real Estate is one of Australia’s fastest-growing real estate businesses, with approximately 330 staff across 9 entities.

As Finance Controller, Jesse Chapman helps manage a sophisticated Xero-based finance stack covering consolidated reporting, multi-entity accounts payable, payroll recharging, intercompany workflows, forecasting, month-end processes and AI-assisted analysis.

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ApprovalMax for Approvals

ApprovalMax has significantly improved our approval workflows and billing processes. The AI feature that reads and captures bill data saves a considerable amount of time and reduces manual input. Overall, it has streamlined our controls and improved efficiency across the team. Just wish they would add better filters for searching for POs, and that POs could also be marked as paid/part paid. But overall great. Less paper work, easy trail for following up on invoices and quotes with employees and staff.

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Fathom for Reporting and Consolidations

Fathom is used for consolidated management accounts, board reporting and shareholder reporting across the group.

For Harris Real Estate, Fathom provides cleaner mapping than Xero’s native reporting and helps the finance team produce clear, consolidated reports for leadership and shareholders. It is also used for forecasting, with non-financial drivers uploaded through a master sheet to support more useful projections and KPI reporting.

Fathom also helps manage access for different stakeholders, allowing minority shareholders to receive entity-specific reporting without exposing unnecessary group-level information.

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Mayday for Recharges and Intercompany

Mayday is used to recharge expenses from the central corporate services entity to the relevant operating entities.

All bills are initially posted to the corporate services entity, then child accounts by location are used to allocate costs. Mayday then recharges these expenses to the relevant operating entities each month, creating the corresponding intercompany loan balances.

This helps Harris Real Estate manage multi-entity recharges more efficiently and reduces the manual work involved in keeping intercompany balances aligned.

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Mayday for Prepayments

Mayday is used to manage prepayments and amortisation schedules.

Before Mayday, the team used a custom Excel workbook with keyword scanning to identify potential prepayments, such as insurance. Mayday now helps detect prepayments and manage the related schedules more directly, reducing reliance on manual spreadsheet processes.

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Airwallex for Banking and Reconciliation

Airwallex is used to improve banking, card management and reconciliation.

Harris Real Estate moved from Macquarie to Airwallex to gain more automation and confidence in transaction reconciliation. The business case was built around time saved from reducing manual card reconciliation and improving the efficiency of banking workflows.

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Employment Hero for HR and Payroll

Employment Hero is used as the central HR and payroll platform across the group.

Harris Real Estate runs a single Employment Hero instance, with separate pay runs for each employing entity. This is important for compliance, as each employing entity needs to file separate STP returns with the ATO.

Employment Hero connects directly into one Xero entity, with the remaining entities handled through a supporting Excel Power Query process that creates journals and bills for upload.

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DataSights for Data Warehousing and Dashboards

DataSights is used to pull data from Xero and Employment Hero into Power BI.

This gives Harris Real Estate a more flexible reporting layer for budget owner dashboards, workforce metrics and operational finance insight. By combining financial and non-financial data, the finance team can give department heads access to the information they need, while keeping permissions controlled through row-level security.

It also creates opportunities to automate more finance processes in future, including leave provisions and other multi-entity postings.

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Hubdoc for Document Capture

Hubdoc is used as the first step in the accounts payable workflow.

Bills flow into a central inbox, are captured through Hubdoc OCR, and then move into the approval process before being posted into Xero. This gives the finance team a cleaner way to collect and process supplier documents before they reach the accounting system.

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Claude for Variance Analysis

Claude is being used with DataSights MCP to support transaction-level variance analysis.

For Jesse, AI is not about handing over control of the finance function. It is more like a turbo boost for repetitive work, helping the team analyse information faster while keeping human review and judgement in place.

The focus is on using AI to improve speed and efficiency without compromising accuracy or control.

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Power BI for Budget Owner Reporting

Power BI is used to create dashboards for budget owners and department heads.

The key benefit is granular access. Rather than giving everyone the same reports, Power BI allows budget owners to see the data relevant to their area, including their own chart of accounts and performance information.

This helps move reporting away from static finance outputs and towards live, role-specific insight that people across the business can actually use.

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