Mayday + CFO Techstack

More than a community. A movement.

Every now and then, you get a moment that makes you stop and look around.

For us, this is one of them.

Three years ago, CFO Techstack brought together a group of people willing to challenge assumptions about how modern finance functions could operate. Today, that community is 13,000+ strong. It’s full of finance leaders, consultants and practitioners pushing what’s possible, sharing what they learn and giving others the confidence to follow.

And right now, the quality coming through feels pretty special.

When you challenge convention, possibilities open up.

The Enlightenment movement was built on a simple but powerful idea: Sapere aude, dare to know. To think independently rather than blindly accept inherited wisdom. In 1789, that movement erupted into the French Revolution with its rallying cry of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Fast forward to our own CFO Techstack enlightenment, and those ideas have taken on a new form: Liberty, Extreme Quality and Community.

Liberty to challenge the assumption that growth and complexity inevitably mean ERP. Extreme Quality from harnessing best-of-breed specialisation. And, Community, sharing excitement, best practice and confidence to do things differently.

More and more finance leaders are blazing that trail, scaling with Xero + Mayday + best-in-class tech stack, and sharing what they’ve learned along the way. ERP isn’t going anywhere. But the evidence that there’s another way has become impossible to ignore.

The evidence is everywhere

You can see that spirit in the inaugural CFO Techstack Awards. More than 100 submissions across six categories came in. Truth be told, we’d planned to have announced the winners by now. But we were blown away by the volume and quality, so we pushed the timetable back to give them the consideration they deserved.

Behind those entries are brilliant finance leaders, teams, consultants, transformation stories and solutions. People doing exceptional work and raising the bar for everyone around them.

For finalist Katrina Bignasca, Group CFO at Asseti, the impact is clear: “We enrich and develop each other, we inspire each other to be curious, test and adopt new tech and ideas daily… as we work together with mutual respect and support for each other, to grow our businesses and our teams.”

Collectively, the submissions tell an even bigger story: just look at the depth of quality that now exists across this community.

The trailblazers are multiplying

And we’re seeing that expertise spread.

Stackademy takes knowledge from people who have actually done this work and makes it available to more of the community. Their lessons, experiences and hard-won insights become someone else’s starting point.

And the first graduates are coming through.

As recent graduate Anna Page, CA put it: “Highly recommend it for anyone working in/with fast-growing Xero-based businesses! Looking forward to doing Level 2 of the certification.”

That’s what makes this so exciting. One person blazes a trail. They share what they know. Someone else learns from it, builds on it and goes further.

And this is only the beginning

The CFO Techstack Awards and Stackademy are just two manifestations of something much bigger.

There’s so much more coming. More ways to share knowledge, more opportunities to learn from one another, more brilliant work to celebrate and more ideas to come from the community itself.

Liberty. Extreme Quality. Community. Three ideas at the heart of a movement whose momentum is only growing.

We can’t wait to see where you take it next.

COMMUNITY INSIGHTS

🎤 How I stacked it

Roxanne O'Sullivan, CFO at Amalgamated Property Group

Amalgamated Property Group delivers residential, commercial and build-to-rent projects across Canberra and Queensland, with a portfolio exceeding $4 billion.

Roxanne leads a finance team of four, overseeing finance across the group's 24 entities.

Xero. Core accounting across all entities, covering bank reconciliations, AP, AR and the general ledger.
Mayday. Balancer reconciles intercompany loans and posts correcting journals, without needing to open each Xero file. Recharger on-charges head-entity costs to the right entity each month, including JV partner costs. HQ compares and reconfigures charts of accounts, and proved useful during a recent leasing software transition.
Derive. The team moved to Derive in April to handle AP across 24 entities. It routes invoices to the right entity, captures line-item detail, and checks spend against supplier history, ABN, GST registration and bank details, with invoice search available across all entities at once.
Eftsure. Every payment batch is verified through Eftsure before reaching the bank, protecting against phishing and payment fraud on the multi-million-dollar payments made to suppliers.
Employment Hero. HR and payroll run from one place, with onboarding, salary change notifications for key managers, and built-in Payday Super and STP compliance. Rostering visibility also helps the café manager forecast shift wage costs.
Flex. Connects Excel directly to Xero, turning reports and reconciliations into something that updates at the click of a button.
Syft.Used for group consolidation and quarterly reporting, though reports are usually refined further in Excel or PDF once exported.
Re-Leased. Used to manage commercial assets, including key lease details and timelines, tenant communications, invoicing and AR follow-up.
RMS Cloud.The platform behind Serviced Apartments bookings. The team communicates with customers directly through RMS and avoids booking clashes, while daily journals post automatically to Xero, removing manual work from income reconciliation.
Square. Used as the POS terminal, giving the team ready access to sales data and trends, with direct integration into Xero.

See Roxanne's full stack.

If you'd like to share your stack with the community, get in touch with kristin.morgan@getmayday.com.

GIVE ME HOPE

Reader's question:

“I was recently brought on as the first finance hire at a start-up. Until now, one of the founders handled the bookkeeping, doing the bare minimum for statutory compliance. As a result, the books are a mess: there’s no accrual accounting, supporting documentation is missing, bank accounts are unreconciled, and transactions have been misposted. We have a fundraise coming up in six months and need to get everything in order ASAP. Where do we start?"

Harriet's answer:

Start with a materiality assessment. Not every account needs the same level of attention, and pretending otherwise means you will run out of time before you run out of problems. Focus on the accounts that are largest, highest risk, and most likely to come under scrutiny during due diligence.

Revenue first. If your revenue numbers do not hold up, nothing else in the P&L can be trusted either. Investors will forgive some untidiness in operating expenses. They will not forgive an unclear paper trail from your books to your contracts and supporting evidence.

After revenue, think like an auditor. Staff costs, tax and other liabilities owed to HMRC, bank loans, and cash accuracy. Having taken Arbolus through a Series A to a Series B myself, I know these are the areas that get picked apart first. They're usually where the real problems hide.

On resourcing, it depends on what your team looks like today. In my experience, tidying up the books properly needs someone with existing accounting or finance knowledge rather than a generalist who will need to learn on the job. An audit background is a good place to start if you're hiring. If a full time hire isn't in the budget, fractional finance teams who work on a project basis can be a good option for this kind of focused clean up.

It is worth knowing that investors take a stage appropriate view of diligence. If you are raising a seed or Series A round, nobody expects audit ready books. But I've found that messy accounts are rarely just about the accounts. They tend to reflect how organised the rest of the business is, and investors notice that.

Plan the project properly. Set a realistic timeline working back from your fundraise date, agree who owns what, and build in time for the surprises you will find once you start digging.

Have a question you’d like Harriet to answer? Submit your questions here.

AWARDS

🏆 CFO Techstack Awards Webinar

We can’t wait to reveal the winners of the CFO Techstack Awards!

Join us as we celebrate the people, teams and solutions making a real difference across the finance tech community.

Date: 15 September

Time: 8am BST / 15:00 AEST

Save your spot. Register now!

UPCOMING EVENTS

📆 Webinar: Mayday turns 5 - What’s the fuss all about?

Join Mayday founders David Tuck and James Scott-Griffin, Harriet Hope and fellow CFO Techstack FLAC members to celebrate five years of Mayday, hear about the journey so far, including winning People’s Choice at the Xero Global App Awards for the second year running, and where we’re heading.

🇦🇺 9 September, 4pm AEST with guests Khalid Ahmed, CFO at EncompaaS & Andy Colalillo, CFO at RSGx — Register
🇬🇧 9 September, 11am BST with guest Felix Matthews, Founder at Abica — Register

HAVE YOUR SAY

📣 Help shape CFO Techstack

We’ve got lots planned for CFO Techstack, but we want what comes next to reflect what matters to you.

Take our short survey and tell us where you are in your finance tech journey, what matters right now and how we can make the community more valuable for you. We’ll bring the findings back to the community, so you can see what others are thinking too.

THE STACK EXCHANGE

🧵 This week's top threads, from The Stack Exchange

The Stack Exchange is the place to connect with peers, stay on top of the latest apps and industry news, and work through the challenges that don't have an easy answer.

Take a look at what's being said:

Want to join the conversation? Sign up here.

NEW IN THE WORLD OF CFO SOFTWARE

🗞️ News from the stack-o-sphere

Airwallex launches T:0 an AI-native accounting platform for startups that automates bookkeeping and revenue recognition. Read more
Joiin adds direct MYOB integration letting finance teams automatically sync MYOB data for individual company or consolidated group reporting. Learn more

WHAT THE DATA SAYS

📊 Stat of the week

35% of Australian small business owners don't often know whether they made a profit in the previous month.

Source: Xero August 2026

MORE OF THE GOOD STUFF

And lastly, our top picks!

🎧 Podcast: CFO 4.0 Revisited: The essential mindsets you need to be successful in your new CFO role with Ash Noah. CFO 4.0 The Future of Finance Podcast. September 2026

📝 Article: Australia’s CBA has lent more than $50bn to small businesses over the past financial year with $31bn going to investments that boost productivity. By Kaaren Morrissey SmartCompany

😆 Joke: Why did the CFO bring a ladder to the budget meeting?Because they’d been asked to take the forecast to the next level.

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