Your weekly go-to guide to transform your finance function into a strategic powerhouse.
Welcome CFO Techstack Community 👋,
To the first CFO Techstack Newsletter of 2025! A new year brings new opportunities to elevate your finance function and set the tone for success in 2025. As we step into this exciting year, our focus is on helping you stay ahead of the curve by embracing innovation, refining your tech stack, and aligning finance with your organisation’s strategic goals.
In this edition, we’ll explore actionable strategies to kickstart the year, highlight trends to watch in the finance world, and share insights from industry leaders to inspire your journey.
Here’s to a prosperous and innovative year ahead—let’s make 2025 the year of transformation for your finance team!
FEATURED ARTICLE
Stepping into the Role of a Strategic Partner
The evolution of the finance function in 2025 demands more than just number crunching and compliance. Today’s finance teams are expected to be strategic partners, using their unique vantage point to drive smarter, more informed decisions across the business. Embracing this expanded role requires finance professionals to harness advanced analytics, break down silos, and upskill their teams, creating a lasting impact on their organisations.
Harness the Power of Advanced Analytics
Strategic finance begins with mastering data. It’s no longer enough to look at the past; the focus is now on forecasting and proactive decision-making. By leveraging predictive analytics and scenario modeling, finance teams can anticipate challenges and uncover opportunities before they arise. Monitoring leading indicators, such as operational and external data, provides a more comprehensive understanding of the business landscape. However, data alone isn’t enough. Data visualisation tools can simplify complexity, transforming raw data into simple, actionable insights that can guide decision-making at all levels.
Actions to Take:
Invest in advanced analytics tools like Fathom, Syft Analytics and Spotlight Reporting, and ensure your team is trained to use them effectively.
Start incorporating predictive analytics into your monthly reporting to identify trends and forecast potential outcomes.
Break Down Silos for Cross-Department Collaboration
Collaboration is another critical element of the strategic partner role. Finance teams must break down silos and foster cross-departmental relationships to ensure financial insights drive broader strategic goals. Partnering with marketing can help measure the ROI of campaigns and optimise resource allocation, while working closely with operations can lead to cost optimisation and supply chain efficiency. Collaborating with HR enables finance to provide data-driven insights for workforce planning and employee retention, demonstrating the far-reaching impact of a cohesive finance function.
Actions to Take:
Schedule regular cross-departmental meetings to understand the goals and challenges of other teams.
Work closely with other departments to establish business drivers, key performance indicators (KPIs), and reports that help identify efficiencies and drive their goals.
Shape the Future of the Organisation
A strategic finance function doesn’t just report on performance; it actively shapes the future of the organisation. By understanding key business drivers, finance teams can work alongside leadership to identify metrics that influence outcomes and recommend strategies that enhance profitability, efficiency, and sustainability. Proactively proposing solutions and tracking the impact of finance-driven initiatives ensures that the function’s contributions are recognised and valued throughout the business.
Actions to Take:
By monitoring performance indicators, you can measure progress, uncover opportunities, and ensure financial insights are driving meaningful outcomes across the business.
Implement a framework for tracking and reporting the impact of finance-driven initiatives. Regularly present insights and recommendations to the leadership team to maintain visibility and influence.
Stepping into the role of a strategic partner isn’t just about adopting new tools or skills—it’s about reimagining how finance interacts with the rest of the business. By embracing advanced analytics, fostering collaboration, and cultivating a forward-thinking mindset, finance teams can elevate their impact and play a pivotal role in shaping organisational success in 2025 and beyond.
COMMUNITY INSIGHTS
🎤 How I stacked it
Luke Streeter, CEO at flinder, shares their tech stack
flinder, now part of Ascendant, operates smart finance functions tailored to fast-growth businesses. With an elastic finance team, they adapt seamlessly to your changing needs, scaling up or down as required. Specialising in full finance functions or hybrid models for later-stage scale-ups, particularly in tech, SaaS, and e-commerce, their expertise extends far beyond accounting. They ensure robust processes, reliable data, and key metrics are in place to drive informed decision-making and meet investor expectations as your business evolves.
Luke told us, "As CEO of flinder, my days are diverse—ranging from exploring new business opportunities and building partnerships to supporting team development, evaluating the latest technology, and more recently, overseeing the migration of two award-winning businesses. Having transitioned from COO to CEO, I’ve stepped back from direct client relationships to focus on driving the growth of the business. A key responsibility is continually assessing our Tech Stack, not just evaluating what we currently use, but identifying the best-in-class solutions for our client portfolio."
Here's what Luke and their team are using to deliver their internal finance function:
Xero for General Ledger: The core Xero application is outstanding—serving as the central hub that seamlessly connects to the best-in-class apps. It’s user-friendly, with excellent core functionality. It would be exciting to see Xero embrace automation and AI further, with quick wins like automating bank rules to enhance its capabilities.
AI & RPA for Automation: While not directly connected to Xero, we have a daily robotic process built on UiPath that handles bank reconciliations. This process clears bank rules and, based on specific criteria, also clears green matches on the Xero bank reconciliation. The use of AI and automation is rapidly increasing, and it’s crucial that we capitalise on these marginal gains.
Xero expenses for Employee Expense Claims:Xero Expenses is great for simplified expense processing. With a team of around 30 in the UK and not heavy users of expenses, it has always been sufficient, with a single approver handling all team expenses. However, we are exploring Dext for expense management in case our needs expand.
GoCardless for Billing: Automatically collecting cash on the due date is essential for improving your working capital cycle, that's why we use GoCardless. In addition to the working capital benefits, this approach eliminates the need for a credit control function, helping keep the team and finance operations lean!
Fathom for Reporting: We use Fathom for reporting and analysis, in addition to consolidation (or more accurately, aggregation). It’s incredibly easy to use and set up, with some excellent template reports. This was our system of choice at the time, and once you become familiar with a system, you tend to stick with it unless something significantly better comes along. That said, we have nothing against their competitors and have heard many positive things about Syft as well!
Telleroo for Payments: A key risk for any finance team is managing payments. Manually entering payments into the bank is not only time-consuming but also increases the risk of error. Telleroo streamlines the supplier payment process, making it seamless and adding valuable controls. Additionally, it supports payroll payments with integrations to many of the leading payroll software solutions.
Mayday for Intercompany: The feature I love most in Mayday is BRAG—being able to post the other side of an inter-company transaction (is quad-entry a thing?) without leaving our main Xero account is fantastic. While we don’t have much inter- or intra-company activity, making us lighter users, it’s a great time saver for those teams that do.
Revolut for FX: Having a challenger app-focused bank with decent FX rates is a must, in my opinion. Virtual cards, physical cards (I love my metal card), all on an easy-to-set-up, administer, and run platform—Revolut is fantastic for this. Airwallex is also great, and we use both, benefiting from strong FX rates across the two.
TaxCalc for Statutory Accounts and Corporation Tax: As chartered accountants, we handle our own accounts and tax, but I want to give a shout-out to TaxCalc. It’s a fantastic piece of software with some recent developments and enhanced functionality, particularly in consolidation.
The apps below, whilst not connected to Xero, felt worthy of a shout-out as they are used on a daily basis:
HubSpot
Qwilr
AirTable
Microsoft 365 suite - I think we often forget the power of Excel, Outlook and Word. Having everything on the same MS 365 infrastructure also allows you to utilise the likes of Microsoft Copilot!
🧵 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:
Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down. Learn more
Spendesk - Inactive digital subscriptions cost UK businesses up to £600m annually.Learn more
HedgeFlows have secured wider regulatory approval from the FCA. Learn more
WHAT THE DATA SAYS
📊 Stat of the week
A recent survey indicates that 60% of firms plan to boost their technology spending in 2025, reflecting a 10% rise compared to the levels observed in 2022 and 2023.
Kicking off 2025, we want to hear all about your month-end struggles and biggest challenges. Keep an eye out for our polls—your input will be invaluable! We'll use your insights, alongside advice from top finance influencers, to share game-changing tips for mastering month end in 2025.
What’s your top resolution for improving month end in 2025?
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