Why Building Great Finance Functions Isn’t About Building Bigger Teams

In our last newsletter we talked about the key insights from our 2026 CFO Techstack Awards submissions, in particular the ERP absence and the multi-entity problem nearly every transformation story was about.

But there was another pattern sitting underneath nearly every award category, and it wasn't about revenue or tools at all. It was about who was actually telling these stories.

The best stories came from smaller teams, not bigger ones.

The single most common bragging point across every category wasn't revenue growth or a slicker dashboard. It was growth without a proportional headcount increase.

Katrina Bignasca, winner of the Finance Leader of the Year shared:

“I have scaled finance with remarkable efficiency utilising technology, minimal cost per head with no HR headcount!”

Whilst Josh Hawkey, one the finalists for Finance Leader of the Year, shared a similar story. Building and scaling his finance function (nearly) all by himself:

“I joined as Tracksuit's first finance hire post-Series A and built the function from scratch now a three-person team supporting a 200-person, multi-entity business across NZ, AU, UK and US.”

Countless other submissions re-iterated this same message. That it’s not always about needing more headcount. It's about leveraging technology, and building great systems... sure, sometimes new heads will be needed, but it's often not the first place you need to look.

Fixing the plumbing costs a fraction of the alternative.

We share these stories because we believe there's a real implication in this for the next board conversation you have.

If your case for investment is "we need more people," the strongest stories in this dataset argue a different case lands better: fix the plumbing first.

Well-designed, well-implemented tooling isn't free. Bringing in the right app or the right implementation expert costs something. But it's a fraction of the cost of an ERP rollout, and a fraction of the cost of solving the same problem by hiring your way through it, year after year.

A board-pack turnaround cut from weeks to days, or a close that goes from five days to one, is a far easier number to put in front of a CEO than a headcount request, and it's the kind of result this whole batch of submissions suggests is genuinely achievable, not aspirational.

This doesn't mean you need to do it alone.

Just because the message here is to look at the tech and systems before adding additional heads... doesn't mean you need to do it all alone.

None of these award-winning submissions did it alone. They leveraged the community around them (for many, this community was pivotal).

So, if you're staring down a stack problem and don't know where to start, that's precisely what the Stack Exchange, the FTS Consultant Directory and Stackademy are there for. Connect with peers, find expert advice and more. Leverage this community for all its worth 👏

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That's the wrap on what this year's Awards told us.

Hopefully there's something new to learn, or at least some validation that you're already thinking the right way!

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COMMUNITY INSIGHTS

🎤 How I stacked it

Lucy Winterbourn, Finance Strategy Manager at Auror
Finance Team of the Year for 2026 🏆

Auror is a New Zealand-headquartered SaaS business behind a retail crime intelligence platform, with roughly 280 people across four entities in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US.

Lucy Winterbourn, Finance Strategy Manager, is part of a 12-person finance team that closes month-end in only seven days. Lucy shared that the team doesn't just track that metric internally. They report it to the board as "time to insights", which frames the close as the thing that gets decision-makers timely information, not as an accounting chore.

The team shared their tech stack with us earlier this year, but things have continued to evolve. They’ve recently taken home the title of Finance Team of the Year - at the 2026 Global CFO Techstack Awards - so there was no time like the present to share an update of their award-winning tech stack.

Here are the apps (of which there are many) they now run:

Xero is the core accounting platform, handling day-to-day bookkeeping and financial records across Auror's four entities.
Mayday takes intercompany reconciliations and recharges out of spreadsheets, and now also covers prepayments. The team is using Mayday HQ for a chart of accounts project across the entities and is testing Mayday's new Accruals product.
Bob Finance (formerly Mosaic) has handled consolidation but is being decommissioned. The team is evaluating replacements, with Syft, now part of Xero, one option on the table.
Google Sheets is where the main reporting happens, feeding into Google Slides for stakeholders to review.
G-Accon pulls Xero data into Sheets with a simple, flexible setup the team controls end to end.
Salesforce runs the sales cycle and revenue forecasting, and is the data source feeding commissions.
Qobra calculates commissions across around ten plans with varied rates, SPIFs and accelerators, integrating with Salesforce and Slack.
HiBob centralises HR and employee management across all four entities, even though payroll is split by region. HiBob is also their UK payroll system.
iPayroll runs New Zealand payroll and local compliance.
Xero Payroll covers the Australian team and sits natively alongside Xero.
Justworks manages US payroll, including multi-state compliance.
Airwallex provides corporate cards, expense reconciliation and cross-border payments for the NZ, AU and UK teams, with card-freezing recently switched on.
Ramp covers US corporate cards, virtual and physical. It got there first, the US team likes it, and there's been no reason to force a switch to Airwallex.
ApprovalMax manages multi-layer approvals on supplier and customer invoices. There are no purchase orders, just approvals on the spend itself.
Cake Equity manages the cap table and employee equity plans as a standalone tool.
Node manages software procurement and SaaS spend.
Claude is currently being used (carefully) to improve month-end workpapers, and cross-check commission calculations. The team still have AI under tight security restrictions.

See Auror's full stack.

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

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GIVE ME HOPE

Reader's question:

We are a single-entity business on Xero and it is working well. At what point should I start thinking about whether our tools are still the right fit as we grow?

Harriet's answer:

If you're a single-entity business on Xero, you can be confident it will serve you well for a long time yet, unless you're dealing with genuinely extreme transaction volumes (and I've seen businesses push well past the usually recommended limits without any real issues).

The question isn't really whether to move off Xero. It's whether your wider stack of ecosystem apps is still doing its job. If you're already asking that, it's usually the signal to do a review.

How often you repeat that review depends on your growth rate. A steady-state business might only need to look once a year. A fast-growing one should probably revisit every quarter or six months.

When you do, map out your current processes and ask four things about each one:

How critical or risky is it to the business?
How prone to error is it today?
What effort or cost would it take to automate or replace?
And how much time would that actually save?

That framework does most of the prioritising for you. A risky, error-prone process is high priority whatever it costs to fix. A process that's working fine but would take a lot of effort to change is low priority, even if it's slightly clunky. And a process that's working fine but could be automated cheaply and easily is worth doing simply because it's low effort for a real gain.

At Arbolus, Mayday was one of the tools that came out of a review like this and just kept earning its place. We were actually Mayday's first customer, and it stayed part of our stack right through Series A and Series B without ever becoming the thing we needed to replace.

If you want a broader sense of what this looks like in practice, our How I Stacked It series is worth a browse. Seeing how other finance leaders have built stacks that work for their business is a good source of inspiration when you're figuring out what yours should look like next.

The other habit worth building is looking ahead rather than just at what's in front of you. Have a rough sense of how long each of your current tools has left in it, given where the business is heading. Keep half an eye on what's most likely to be outgrown first, particularly around moments like overseas expansion or becoming audit ready. Spotting the weak point before it becomes a problem is a lot cheaper than fixing it afterwards.

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

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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:

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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.

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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 free here.

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NEW IN THE WORLD OF CFO SOFTWARE

🗞️ News from the stack-o-sphere

Maxio launched 'wallets' to automatically track prepaid credit and token balances, replacing spreadsheets and manual workarounds for SaaS and AI companies. Read more.
Meridian by Pilot today launched a Xero Connector, a free tool that lets AI agents do work in Xero. Read more.

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WHAT THE DATA SAYS

📊 Stat of the week

48% of CFOs say they would follow an AI recommendation even when it conflicts with their own judgement.

Source: CFO.com, article here.

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MORE OF THE GOOD STUFF

And lastly, our top picks!

🎧 Podcast: People and Places: The Geography of a CEO Career. Listen here.

📝 Article: Mid-market CFO's struggling to make AI work. Article here.

😆 Joke: Why did the CFO bring a ladder to the board meeting? Because they heard the company was trying to reach new heights.

Why not forward this newsletter to someone you think would enjoy it?

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