Your weekly go-to guide to transform your finance function into a strategic powerhouse.
Welcome CFO Techstack Community 👋,
It’s the first CFO Techstack Newsletter of 2026!
To kickstart the year, we’re so excited to share an exclusive preview of our upcoming State of the Stack 2026 Report, sponsored byXero, coming out later this month.
State of the Stack 2026 is the definitive playbook for finance leaders who want to build or optimise their tech stack for the year ahead. Every insight in the report comes from our community of 13,000 finance leaders building modern systems with Xero at the core.
Inside, you'll discover:
Which apps finance leaders rely on most in 2026
Proven tech stack combinations in real case studies
Featured apps in key categories, based on finance leader citations
Two years ago, CFO Techstack was founded to plug a clear gap in the market: a community-led content resource for finance leaders who wanted to scale without defaulting to a traditional ERP. What began as a content & community hub has now become a movement.
Since then, we’ve:
Passed 100 newsletter episodes
Hosted our first in-person Stacked conferences in London & Sydney
Grown our Slack community, The Stack Exchange, to 500+ finance leaders, all actively building and sharing what modern finance teams and tech stacks look like in practice.
State of the Stack 2026 is not just another report. It is a major milestone in that journey.
In the United States, the President delivers the annual State of the Union. This is our equivalent for finance teams, a signal moment that captures the direction of travel for modern finance, and a definitive snapshot of how leading teams are choosing to scale today.
Every insight in this report comes from our How I Stacked It series: weekly stories from finance leaders openly sharing the exact tech stacks they use to scale without ERP. Every app featured and every category in the App Map is derived from these real community recommendations, not sponsorships, not opinion, and never on a whim.
These are the tools powering the day-to-day reality of teams scaling with Xero and Mayday at the core, and together, they form a living blueprint for the future of finance.
Who this report is for: The M-Powered
This report is for a growing, distinct segment of the market we call The M-Powered.
These aren’t small businesses, but they aren’t traditional enterprises either. They are finance teams with 2–10 in-house operators, running multi-entity, multi-currency environments, thriving on Xero + Mayday + best-in-class apps.
M-Powered finance teams are:
✔️ Saving significant time
✔️ Saving huge cost versus ERP
✔️ Closing month-end faster and more accurately
✔️ Moving up the hierarchy of finance work into more strategic impact
This report stands on the shoulders of the early trailblazers of the M-Powered movement: the finance leaders who moved first, took the risk, and showed there was another way. What they’ve built now lights the way for others.
State of the Stack 2026 sponsors
We’re incredibly proud to have Xero as Headline Sponsor of State of the Stack 2026. Their open, connected platform is fundamental to making this movement possible, giving finance teams the foundation they need to build modern, scalable finance functions with flexibility and control. We’re also grateful to GrowCFO for their continued support in helping elevate the voice of the modern finance leader.
In 2025, we saw just how far this model can go. Over the past 12 months alone, Mayday has supported:
46 customers with revenue over $100m
62 customers with revenue over $50m
These are sophisticated, multi-entity, multi-currency teams running on Xero plus best-in-class apps, not traditional ERPs.
With the reach of this report, and off the back of our newly announced partnership with Xero, Mayday excited to help even more finance teams build modern tech stacks with Xero at their core, mending month end, scaling efficiently, and leaving ERP behind.
This report is only the beginning; what comes next will be written by the finance leaders who choose this path in 2026 and beyond.
We can’t wait to see what they build.
This is an exclusive preview of our upcoming State of the Stack 2026 Report, coming out on the 22nd January. Join the waitlist now!
COMMUNITY INSIGHTS
🎤 How I stacked it
Atrik Gadoya, Finance Director at Global Charter, shares his tech stack.
Global Charter is a private aviation brokerage company headquartered in the UK, with operations expanding across the US and UAE.
As Finance Director, Atrik Gadoya's role involves overseeing multi-entity financial operations, ensuring compliance across jurisdictions, building scalable finance automation workflows, and driving business insights through data.
On a day-to-day basis, Atrik balances both strategic and operational challenges - from implementing multi-currency cash flow models and intercompany transfer pricing frameworks, to optimising their tech stack and mentoring the finance team.
Here's what Atrik and his team are using:
Xero for Core Accounting Platform:Xero supports our multi-entity and multi-currency finance operations. It is a robust and intuitive accounting platform that scales well. More complex workflows require app add-ons to fully automate and customise month-end processes.
Stripe for Customer Card Payments:Stripe is excellent for frictionless payment collection and integration with Xero, with automatic reconciliation improving cash application. The downside is the processing fees, which can add up for high-volume transactions.
Revolut for Virtual Employee Cards and Spend Management: Revolut is great for issuing virtual cards and tracking employee spending in real-time, with easy syncing to Xero via bank feeds. However, you have to upgrade to higher plans to access deeper expense policy controls.
Mayday for Month-End Automation: We use Mayday for intercompany postings, balance sheet reconciliation, and increasingly for revenue deferrals and prepayments, making month-end close far more accurate and audit-ready. It is an indispensable tool for multi-entity organisations and has significantly streamlined our month-end.
Syft for Reporting: We use Syft for dynamic management reporting and financial analysis. It provides clean visual dashboards and customisable management reports that help our leadership make quick, informed decisions.
Zapier to sync our CRM and Xero:Zapier eliminates manual data entry and aligns our operational and financial data. It is a flexible no-code automation tool that bridges Xero with our CRM to keep customer and invoice data in sync. It’s incredibly powerful, though complex workflows can quickly become hard to manage without proper documentation.
Keen to share how you stack it? Email: emily.lockyer@getmayday.com
Clients want more. Your team’s at its limit. Now what?
Jason Blumer knows that challenge better than most. As CEO of Thriveal,
he has helped hundreds of firms rethink how they structure, price and scale advisory. This live session is your chance to tap into Jason’s playbook for modern firm leadership. He'll be breaking down:
The challenges: Why so many firms hit a wall as they scale and what drives team burnout.
What good looks like: The traits of firms that grow sustainably and keep people engaged.
How to think differently about structure, leadership, and advisory capacity.
Finance leaders face a pivotal moment: 89% of CFOs plan to increase enterprise spending on AI in 2026, yet most lack confidence in proving ROI. Gartner’s latest insights reveal the trends reshaping finance and the strategies CFOs and their teams need to navigate disruption effectively.
This session explores how AI is transforming the finance function, what it means for your team and how to prepare for a new era of efficiency and growth.
THE STACK EXCHANGE
🧵 This week's top threads, from The Stack Exchange
The Stack Exchange is a Slack forum for connecting with peers, sharing insights, and staying updated on apps and industry events, helping you transform your finance function into a strategic powerhouse.
Here are this week's top 3 discussions from The Stack Exchange:
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