For Mark Ashley, previous Global Financial Controller at Crimson Education, growth hit like a tidal wave.
With a 700-strong team and 35 entities across 25 countries, what was once a clean, efficient Xero set-up had started to crack under the pressure.
Like many finance leaders, Mark was led to believe that ERP was the natural next step: a single, scalable system that would make his dreams of order, automation and control come true.
What followed, however, was a very different reality…
Xero's breaking point
Crimson’s finance team was well and truly stretched to its limit. Manual processes for intercompany reconciliations and revenue recognition had turned month end into a constant battle.
Mark recalls:
“It became unmanageable at the end. A big reason we needed to move to ERP was the intercompany side.”
Xero had taken Crimson far, but as the business grew more complex, it was starting to show its limits.
Mark needed something that could help unify the entities, manage Crimson’s specific and complex revenue recognition requirements, and bring order to the chaos.
That search for control led Mark to make the same call many CFOs do when growth starts to outpace their systems: move to ERP, the "next logical step."
The ERP promise
The pitch was irresistible.
ERP vendors offered Mark a compelling vision: one system to rule them all. A single source of truth. Total automation. Perfect control.
For a finance team stretched thin, the appeal was obvious.
"Ultimately, we decided to go with NetSuite. It was more powerful in terms of what we wanted to do and how we recognised revenue, which was a little bit unique."
NetSuite consultants were confident, demos were seamless, and the message was clear: ERP is what serious businesses use to scale.
Mark believed it and, for a while, it seemed like salvation.
But, as implementation began, the cracks started to show. Mark admits:
“I wish we had looked wider. We were promised the world from our consultant.”
A tale as old as time...
What looked clean in a demo became tangled in reality.
From the moment implementation began, data migration was messy. Processes clashed with rigid system rules, and every fix seemed to uncover another problem.
“As we got into the weeds of it, it was very difficult to do […] You can go down massive rabbit holes into various processes.”
The supposed “one unified system” became a web of consultants, meetings and manual workarounds.
Instead of automation, the team found themselves re-exporting data into spreadsheets and re-uploading it just to handle deferred revenue.
External contractors became permanent fixtures in the team just to keep the system running.
Costs ballooned, deadlines slipped and productivity sank.
“It went over budget, and off-schedule; the classic ERP story, as old as time.”
Enlightenment
After "two years with a long tail of issues", the ERP was finally in a good place, but it had taken far longer, and caused far more pain, than anyone expected.
The process eventually delivered transformation, but not without cost: delays, consultants, and constant firefighting along the way.
Reflecting on the change, Mark says the ERP move felt inevitable at the time: Xero’s transaction limits had become a real constraint. But with the right tech stack around Xero, one that could automate intercompany reconciliations, manage revenue recognition and handle scale, the business might have avoided such a painful transition.
“If Mayday had existed back then, we 1000% would have used it.”
A smarter way forward
When Mark joined Altered Capital as CFO in 2024, he carried those lessons with him and took a different approach.
This time, the finance set-up remained simple: no ERP, no consultants, no heavy infrastructure.
Mark recommends that, if you have the choice, the best path is Xero, supercharged with the right tech stack apps.
“Everyone uses Xero. All our portfolio companies use Xero […] Xero’s a dream compared to an ERP.”
The bottom line
Mark’s story is one we hear time and time again. He is a classic ERP Survivor.
ERPs promise control, but too often deliver cost, complexity and fatigue.
By contrast, Xero + the right apps offer automation, flexibility and scalability, without the heavy burden.
Mark’s message is clear: finance teams don’t need to abandon Xero to scale, they just need to stack it smarter!
Next week, we’ll dive into the personal account of another ERP Survivor, Khalid Ahmed. Khalid spent years under the burden of ERP with its rigidity and complexity, before experiencing the ease of Xero with an easy-to-integrate tech stack around it.
👉 If you’re an ERP Survivor, we’d love to hear your story.
Reach out to emily.lockyer@getmayday.com
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