My first real experience of an ERP was at Fever-Tree in 2011. It was meant to bring visibility. Instead, it brought confusion.
At the time, I accepted it as the price of scaling, that complexity was just part of growing fast.
A year later, at WAYN, I discovered Xero for the first time. It opened my eyes to what finance software could be, simple, scalable, and intuitive. It gave us the same visibility we’d been chasing at Fever-Tree, but without requiring consultants, training, or setup pain.
That experience reshaped how I saw finance technology. It showed me that Xero + apps can give growing businesses everything they need, without requiring a costly ERP migration.
That belief became the foundation for everything I’ve founded since, Chaser (2013), Mayday (2021), and CFO Techstack (2023).
This is my ERP Survivor story.
The ERP years
I used NetSuite for a year and didn’t have the first idea what was going on.
When I joined Fever-Tree as Financial Controller in 2011, things were moving fast, new markets, new distributors, new reporting demands.
The UK ran on Sage 50, the US distributor on NetSuite. I was shown how to log in, click a few places, and pull one monthly report. That was it.
In hindsight, there could have been all sorts of issues hiding in plain sight, but without training or specialists, I wouldn’t have known.
We were small and just had to make do, but the experience stuck with me.
Even then, not knowing what I didn’t know, I had a suspicion there must be a better way.
The turning point
After Fever-Tree, I joined WAYN following their Series B round, a fast-growing social travel business who were scaling with Xero as their accounting system.
Until then, I’d assumed Xero was just for small businesses, but it was the opposite: clean, intuitive, empowering. For the first time, I could see exactly what was happening across my finance function, no training required.
It planted a simple question: if Xero could make finance this straightforward for a growing company, why were so many others still stuck in the ERP trap?
Everywhere I looked, teams were tied up in multi-year implementations draining time and money.
That realisation became the inspiration for my next step, founding Chaser, to help finance teams automatically chase late payments, track debtors, and improve working capital.
It was driven by a simple belief: that by creating powerful AR software to extend Xero for growing businesses, we could help them scale further and avoid the costly move to an ERP.
Turning conviction into change
When I started Chaser, there were about 100 apps in the Xero ecosystem. Now there are over 1,000.
Finance teams can finally build connected, best-in-class stacks around Xero, purpose-built for their exact needs.
And that evolution is showing up in the data. At Mayday, we’re seeing more mid-market teams prove that Xero can scale further than ever. In the last 12 months alone, we’ve supported:
- 46 customers with revenue over $100 million
- 62 with revenue over $50 million
These are sophisticated, multi-entity, multi-currency teams scaling with the Xero + Apps model, proof that ERP isn’t inevitable anymore, it's a choice, and the tide is turning.
As Lucy Winterbourn, Finance Strategy Manager at Auror, puts it:
"Mayday has saved us from needing to move to an ERP; it has been a game-changer."
The rise of CFO Techstack
What’s most exciting today isn’t just the technology, it’s the array and variety of finance teams joining us on this journey.
Through CFO Techstack, we’ve built a community of finance leaders showing how far a Xero-based stack can really take you.
Across 99 editions of our newsletter, we’ve heard from leaders sharing their own set-ups in our How I Stacked It segment, proving this isn’t theory, it’s reality.
Here are How I stacked It's top apps that finance leaders are using to scale with Xero, listed by the number of times they've been referenced.
Want to see how they were Stacked with Xero? 👉 Visit How I Stacked It here.
Looking back
The most sophisticated finance functions I see today aren’t running on ERPs. They’re running on connected, intuitive Xero + app stacks and scaling faster because of it.
That’s the shift we’re living through and momentum is only building. Mayday now supports 12,000 organisations, powering over 250,000 postings back to Xero, helping teams mend month end pain and extend their life on Xero.
CFO Techstack has surpassed 5,000 subscribers, a growing proof point that this community is expanding fast, united by one belief: scaling without an ERP isn’t just an alternative, it’s the superior option.
And the most exciting thing? We’re only just getting started.
👉 If you’re an ERP Survivor, we’d love to hear your story.
Reach out to emily.lockyer@getmayday.com
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