What 150+ Award Submissions Just Told Us About How Finance Teams Are Actually Scaling

We didn't run the CFO Techstack Awards for a morale boost or a few good LinkedIn posts. We ran them because finance leaders in the middle of the SME market, running genuinely complex, multi-entity, fast-scaling businesses, don't get anywhere near the recognition they deserve.

What we didn't expect was the scale of it. 150+ submissions across nine categories, from finance leaders and teams to the apps and consultants who work alongside them, and the depth behind a lot of those stories caught us off guard.

Read individually, they're good stories. Read all at once, and patterns appear.

None of the forward-thinkers are picking ERP.

The first thing that jumps out: not one submission, in any category, described a business that had moved onto an ERP. Every mention of an ERP in this dataset was someone leaving one, not joining one. Migrations off of NetSuite, Sage Intacct decisions made and reversed, Dynamics quietly abandoned.

Multiple submissions, completely independently, described a six-week move onto Xero as the moment things got easier, not harder.

Nobody entered these Awards to make that point. It's just what the community chose to write about, unprompted, when asked "what's your best work this year?"

And that absence tells you something specific… Perhaps something this community has known for a while: the finance leaders in this segment who see themselves as forward-thinking are not moving to an ERP. If anyone's telling you that's the natural next step once you outgrow Xero, this is 150+ pieces of evidence that the people actually doing the work disagree.

Accounting is not the no.1 challenge. Its architecting the stack for multiple entities.

The second pattern: the problem everyone's actually solving isn't "accounting" anymore, it's multi-entity.

Reconciliation, AP, payroll, reporting. Nearly every transformation story submitted was really about re-architecting one of those for a group of entities, not a single Xero org.

If you're running more than one entity and it's still eating your week, you're not behind the curve. You're describing the single most common problem in this entire dataset.

AI showed up. But not as a feature.

Third: AI showed up in a huge share of submissions, but not as a headline feature anyone was still excited to announce.

It read as assumed infrastructure, the way "we use a spreadsheet" would have read five years ago.

Nobody submitted "we added AI" as their achievement. They submitted the outcome, and AI happened to be part of how they got there.

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Next issue, we're getting into the pattern that surprised us second-most. The best stories weren't from the biggest teams. They were from the smallest ones, and what that means the next time you're standing in front of your board asking for something.

COMMUNITY INSIGHTS

🎤 How I stacked it

Jeffrey Atizado, CEO at SMB Consultants
FTS Consultant of the Year for 2026 🏆

SMB Consultants helps businesses design and implement finance and operational systems that can scale. As CEO and Co-Founder, Jeff Atizado works with clients to identify where existing systems are holding them back and design a better way forward.

One of the team's standout implementations this year was Wellizen, a health and wellness distributor operating across Australia and New Zealand. The business had just six weeks to move off a locked NetSuite instance, with no option for a phased rollout.

Beyond the technical challenge, the transition required a shift in how the team thought about its systems and processes, from managing everything in one place to working across a connected stack.

Here are the apps they now run:

1. Xero is the core financial system, providing the foundation for Wellizen's day-to-day accounting across its Australian and New Zealand entities.
2. Mayday connects the Australian and New Zealand finance operations, automating intercompany reconciliation between the Xero entities and cutting month-end reconciliation work by around 80%.
3. Cin7 Core sits at the centre of inventory and order management, connecting demand from Shopify and Amazon to the right operations, warehouse and finance systems in each market.
4. CartonCloud connects Wellizen's third-party logistics providers to Cin7 Core, keeping inventory and fulfilment information aligned as orders move through the business.
5. Shopify is one of the key e-commerce channels feeding the stack, with orders flowing directly into Cin7 Core rather than being re-keyed manually.
6. Amazon is the other major e-commerce channel, with marketplace orders also flowing straight into Cin7 Core alongside Shopify.

See Jeff's full stack.

If you want to showcase your stack contact jack.thiel@getmayday.com

GIVE ME HOPE

Reader's question:

How do I build a better relationship with my CEO? We are not on the same page and I am struggling to get traction on things I know the business needs.

Harriet's answer:

Start by being honest about what the relationship actually looks like today.

For a lot of finance leaders, contact with the CEO is mostly transactional, a message when something needs signing off, a meeting when a decision has to be made. Finance can even end up feeling like an annoyance, the function chasing approvals, missing receipts and overdue expenses. If that's the shape of your relationship, it's hard to get traction on anything bigger, because you've never built the context for it.

If you don't already have a regular one-to-one in the diary, put one in. Use it for more than status updates. Ask how the CEO is feeling about the business more broadly. What are they excited about? What worries them? What do they see as the biggest risks and opportunities right now? Ask about the board too. What's their mood, what are they expecting over the next six months, and have they given feedback on the reporting you could actually act on?

Bring something to those conversations rather than just listening. Do some analysis off your own back and come with a specific observation. Something like, I looked into the customer data from the last six months and noticed X, have you thought about Y? That single habit does more to shift how a CEO sees finance than almost anything else. It shows you're thinking about the business, not just the numbers behind it.

It's also worth asking directly what the CEO would find useful from finance that doesn't exist yet. A monthly OKR review, sharper board reporting, whatever it is. Being the one who proposes it is more powerful than waiting to be asked.

On the "not on the same page" part specifically, spend time understanding why the CEO sees things the way they do before trying to shift it. Is there something they're missing that you can see? Finance is often the only function with both the whole-business view and the granular detail underneath it. That's a genuine advantage, but only if you use it to inform the conversation rather than to win an argument.

None of this happens in one conversation. It's a relationship you build steadily, by consistently showing up as someone with real insight rather than someone with a request. The more consistently you do that, the more your CEO will start bringing you in earlier, rather than you having to push your way in.

Have a question you’d like answered? Submit your questions here.

EVENT

🏆 Meet the Global App Award Winners!

Off the back of our inaugural CFO Techstack Awards, and Xero's own Global App Awards, we're bringing all the winning apps together in one place!

Mayday, Cin7, Derive, Gojee, Ignition, ShiftCare, Pulsify and AhoyAhoy.

Learn about the 8-award winning apps in one short webinar. Then go deeper with those that are of interest.

App speed dating taken to another level.

The details:

• Date: Wednesday 7th October
• Time: 12pm Sydney / 12pm UK
• Duration: 45 minutes

Two sessions to choose from depending on your timezone:

• Register for the UK & South Africa session
• Register for the AU & NZ session

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:

1. Request for 3-way modeller
2. Finance workflows: Power Automate, Claude, Make.com and more

Want to join the conversation? Sign up free here.

NEW IN THE WORLD OF CFO SOFTWARE

🗞️ News from the stack-o-sphere

• Joiin secures €1.5 million growth financing to accelerate global expansion. Read more.
• ApprovalMax removes approver limits from usage-based pricing. Read more.
• Payhawk launches new agentic Playbooks. Read more.

WHAT THE DATA SAYS

📊 Stat of the week

Only 35% of AI usage time is productive, according to recent reports on workplace technology efficiency, highlighting a significant hurdle for corporate finance leaders evaluating tech ROI.

Source: CFO.com, article here.

MORE OF THE GOOD STUFF

And lastly, our top picks!

🎧 Podcast: Building the Operating System for Agentic Automation | Ryan Roccon, CFO, Zapier. Listen here.

📝 Article: Deloitte Finance Trends 2027: Shaping the next era of stakeholder value. Read here.

😆 Joke: What do you call a project manager who actually meets their original budget and timeline? A myth.

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