Michael Hunter is Group AI & Automation Lead at EIA Investments, where he is part of a four-person finance team supporting multiple investments, many of which are themselves groups of companies, across more than 25 legal entities and multiple industries. 

Xero remains at the heart of the finance stack, with tools like Mayday and Syft layered on top to help the team manage the complexity that comes with such a broad portfolio. Michael has been a driving force behind the team's use of automation, with a strong focus on keeping data accurate and reconciled, speeding up reporting and continually looking for new technology that can make the finance function work better.

Xero for Core Finance

‍Xero sits at the centre of our finance stack across the investment portfolio, with significant automation from feeder applications bringing data into the accounting platform. Very little is keyed in by hand: bills, payroll, point-of-sale takings and payments all arrive from feeder applications.

Mayday for Month End

Mayday is used extensively to manage intercompany activity across more than 25 legal entities, including intercompany entries and the on-charging of corporate costs and purchases between entities.

Visit Mayday.

Syft for reconciliation

Syft is embedded into our Excel reconciliation processes. It gives us refreshable workpapers wired to Xero reports and transaction-level detail at the single-entity and group levels, so the recs update themselves instead of being rebuilt from exports every month.

Visit Syft.

Make.com for Automation

‍Make.com moves data from the operating systems into our data lake and handles the daily traffic in Xero: bank transactions, manual journals, invoices and payment batches. It routes email and connects Employment Hero, Deputy, SharePoint, Azure, Power BI, Stripe, SevenRooms, and Tripleseat. Everything it posts to the ledger arrives as a draft for review by a person.

Visit Make.

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Power BI for Monitoring and Data Models

Power BI integrates financial, operational, and market data with the relevant business rules already applied, ensuring that every report presents the same numbers consistently. It also facilitates monitoring the closing process. With just one screen, we can view all Xero files simultaneously: identify which files are still in draft status, which are unreconciled with the bank, which payment batches have not been processed, and any invoices that appear to be duplicates of those in other entities. Without Power BI, we would still need to manually enter and review each Xero file, eliminating the time savings that automation provides.

Visit PowerBI.

Claude for AI

‍Claude automates our reporting process by building controlled data pipelines from our data lake and Xero. It generates HTML dashboard templates hosted in our central Azure portal and populates them with data from Power BI, Power Automate, and Azure. This approach helps us minimise token costs and provides continuous, enriched reporting that would otherwise require us to purchase an enterprise SaaS platform.

Visit Claude.

Power Automate for Office 365 automation

‍Power Automate manages tasks within Microsoft 365, such as routing emails to the appropriate entity in Dext and gathering inputs for dashboards to update reports. It triggers model refreshes when new data arrives and continuously monitors our environment. This makes the orchestration of the technology stack flexible and automatically responsive to changes.

Visit Power Automate.

Lightspeed for Point of Sale

Lightspeed runs point of sale across the hospitality and retail sites that use it, and posts through to Xero.

Visit Lightspeed.

Bepoz for Point of Sale‍

Bepoz covers point of sale and venue operations at the venues that run on it, and posts through to Xero as well. Two platforms, one normalised sales view.

Visit Bepoz.

Stripe for Customer Payments

‍Stripe processes online payments, including customers paying a Xero invoice directly.

Visit Stripe.

Dext for Document Processing

‍Dext automates the capture and processing of bills, receipts and other financial documents before feeding that information into our accounting workflows.

Visit Dext.

Accuri for statutory reporting‍

Accuri allows us to import trial balances from Xero and create draft financial statements.

Visit Accuri.

WorkflowMax for Time Management

‍WorkflowMax manages time across the investment portfolio, giving us greater visibility across the different investment groups.

Visit WorkflowMax.

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