Khalid Ahmed has led finance functions across a variety of industries and growth stages over the years.
As he looks back, one thing stands out vividly: the constant battle with ERP systems that are intended to bring order, but instead bring complexity.
When he joined a fast-growing e-commerce company, their ERP system had been sold as a vital backbone for scaling. In reality, it proved so rigid that every change in product or process resulted in endless technical workarounds and significant pain.
Today, Khalid has left all of that behind, running a multi-entity function on Xero, connected through a stack of modern tools.
Here’s how Khalid went from battling ERP rigidity to building a finance stack that moves at his pace.
When growth meets rigidity
When Khalid took on a role at a rapidly growing Australian online retailer, it was just taking off, scaling with ERP Microsoft Dynamics at the core.
It was at a time when ERPs were “the only solution” to connect the finance function into one system and provide full control and visibility.
“For a business growing that fast, that was changing the entire landscape of Australian retail, with multiple warehousing locations, robotics, handling hundreds and thousands of orders, ERP just felt like the obvious answer.”
Their business was complex and had been susceptible to the classic ERP sales pitch.
With intricate logistics and thousands of daily orders, it felt like an ERP was necessary to keep up.
“It was a large organisation, there were multiple distribution points, there was a lot of stock that was being moved, there were a lot of custom processes that the business had developed.”
Those custom workflows only reinforced the belief that an ERP was the right answer.
“It was important for that organisation to capture the whole transaction flow, from picking to packing to fulfilment, starting from the order placement process all the way through to the customer unboxing their parcels in delight.”
ERP equals inflexible!
Despite all the promises of ERP, it didn’t take long after joining for Khalid to face the grim reality.
ERP wasn’t cloud-based, it wasn’t simple, and it certainly wasn’t agile.
“Whenever there were any sort of technical issues or we needed technical support, it was just a nightmare to deal with.”
Every time the business wanted to add a new product, channel or payment gateway, the finance team was pulled into another cycle of code rewrites, rebuilding and consultant calls.
And, as the business was growing 40–70% year-on-year at the time, this happened a lot!
“Anytime we tried to insert a new process into the business, it meant almost rewriting a whole bunch of code for the ERP and rebuilding it from scratch.”
Put simply, ERP couldn’t keep up with the pace of e-commerce:
“At a time when everything was so new, we were literally inventing ways that businesses could operate. With an ERP, it was rigid and inflexible.”
Firefighting > Finance
The human toll was worse than the technical toll.
Every close meant endless manual reconciliations with 25000-row spreadsheets and long nights chasing errors that should never have existed.
“You press enter, let it start calculating. And if you're lucky, it gets done in an hour. If you're unlucky, you leave it running overnight and you come back in the next morning and find that the computer's crashed or something's failed. We were actually doing that: coming back in the morning to find the computer’s crashed.”
Finance work became reactive as more and more time was swallowed by system issues.
“When you're spending 60-70% of your time just trying to fix a system issue, and the other 30-40% trying to actually work with the business to solve complex challenges […] it isn't great.”
The finance team really was in survival mode.
“You’re left dealing with the mess that inevitably comes when 10,000 transactions didn’t reconcile. At times, it really was a survival experience.”
They had to build Tableau dashboards and data warehouse scripts just to fix what the ERP couldn’t:
“We ended up resolving ERP challenges outside the ERP. We were using Tableau to reconcile things because the system just couldn’t handle it.”
A fresh start
When Khalid moved to a start-up creating smart video solutions, things finally changed.
There would be no ERP this time.
Instead, Khalid surrounded Xero with a modular, API-friendly tech stack, made up of ApprovalMax, Unleashed and EmploymentHero, all designed to fit the business like a glove.
“We could build exactly what we needed without waiting for consultants.”
What previously required weeks of coding could be done instantly:
“It was a very refreshing experience. Where an ERP needed someone to spend a day recoding everything, with the right app, it was only a few clicks.”
Life after ERP
Now, in his current role at EncompaaS, an enterprise AI data platform, Khalid oversees four entities spread across three countries, all running on Xero.
With Mayday, dashboards are live, recs are automatic, and the stress is gone.
“It was a game changer [...] what used to take a day now takes minutes.”
Khalid’s favourite part of this set-up is the adaptability: the ecosystem evolves as the business does.
“The ecosystem changes so rapidly that as we scale, there’ll always be something that fits.”
“It’s built by people who’ve had these problems and will keep evolving to solve them.”
And, would he ever go back to ERP?
“Unless there was an extremely compelling reason for it (e.g. a complex and integrated supply chain or needing regulatory compliance), the value proposition of an ERP is extremely diminished to me.”
The bottom line
Khalid’s ERP Survivor story is one of resilience.
ERPs promise control and integration but, particularly in environments where innovation moves quickly, they often deliver rigidity instead.
“ERPs have their place in certain environments, and definitely work well in predictable and mature businesses. But when your business is still growing and changing fast, they can become a nightmare really quickly.”
For Khalid, the lesson is clear:
“It’s about building around a core that’s flexible and auditable, and surrounding it with tools that can evolve.”
He’s convinced the future belongs to modular finance ecosystems: systems that talk to each other, evolve together, and let finance teams focus on insights instead of error-chasing.
Next week, we’ll hear the personal account of our third ERP Survivor. After being drawn in by the promise of ERP's control and sophistication, he soon found himself tangled in complexity. Now, he’s rediscovered simplicity, running a multi-entity finance function on Xero, strengthened by a smart, modular tech stack built 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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