How I Stacked It

Every finance stack tells a story. How I Stacked It looks inside the tools, workflows and decisions real finance leaders use to build better, more scalable finance teams.

Matthew Claxton

Group CFO at EWS

Matthew Claxton

EWS is an Australian founded EnviroTech company designing, building and deploying remote monitoring units feeding into the Orion platform, with operations in Australia and Canada and customers globally.

As CFO across the group, Matthew has a broad tech stack across ledger, payroll, systems, plus a good amount of commercial and operational work. EWS has a small team by design, which is where this edition highlights how the stack does a lot of the heavy lifting.

Xero for Core Ledger

The core ledger for every entity in the group. It's the hub everything else connects to, and the app ecosystem is what lets a small team run multi-entity without an ERP.

Visit Xero.

Airwallex for Cards and Payments

Runs our entire AP function, plus FX and global banking. One platform for local and overseas suppliers, multi-currency wallets for the Canadian side, and FX rates that beat the banks.

Visit Airwallex.

Employment Hero for HR and Payroll

Payroll and HR together. Pay runs, STP, employee records, and it handles the fiddly stuff well: salary sacrifice, novated leases, allowances that vary by department.

Visit Employment Hero

Salesforce for CRM & Customer Ordering

Our CRM and customer ordering system. Plugged straight into production, so orders flow through to the build instead of being re-keyed.

Visit Salesforce.

Inflow for Production & Inventory Management

Production and inventory management. Tracks components and stock through the build of our monitoring units and keeps operations lined up with the ledger.

Visit Inflow.

Mayday for Month End

The pair we use for our monthly process and close. They keep intercompany and reconciliation tidy across entities and give structure to the close each month.

Visit Mayday.

Claude for Management Reporting

The unexpected one. We retired our traditional management reporting tool and plugged our systems straight into Claude instead. Instead of static month end reports, we get live reporting on demand across the business. Biggest shift in how we use our data, full stop.

Visit Claude