Your weekly go-to guide to transform your finance function into a strategic powerhouse.
Welcome CFO Techstack Community 👋,
Last week, we explored The 2026 Survival Kit section of CFO Techstack's State of the Stack 2026 Report, sponsored by Xero.
This week, we're diving deep into a key section of the App Map and State of the Stack 2026: Core Infrastructure.
We'll see how modern finance teams are building the core of their modern tech stacks - the foundational layer that everything else plugs into, enabling finance teams to automate processes, connect best-in-class tools, and create a flexible stack that can evolve as the business grows.
If you haven't already, you can download State of the Stack here.
FEATURED ARTICLE
State of the Stack: Core Infrastructure
Core Infrastructure is a key pillar in CFO Techstack's App Map 2.0.
The foundation of your tech stack
In 2026, the core of the modern finance tech stack is no longer a single piece of software. It is a unified operating system anchored by Xero and Mayday.
Xero provides the accounting software; Mayday the automation layer for month-end close. Together, they form the core your stack is built around.
Xero: Core Accounting Software
Xero is the cloud accounting software at the heart of the finance function.
With a centralised ledger, real-time bank feeds, and a robust bookkeeping engine, Xero gives finance teams the visibility and control to run the business day to day. Its open ecosystem lets teams add best-in-class apps while keeping the core simple.
Xero: Reporting & Analytics
Building on Xero’s cloud accounting software, Xero customers also leverage Syft Analytics, which was acquired by Xero in September 2024 to accelerate Xero’s insights, advanced reporting and analytics offerings for customers globally.
Syft Analytics
Syft Analytics is an AI powered financial report platform, providing AI commentary and insights across every graph and report so you can go from data to decisions in no time. With Syft Analytics, finance teams can:
Create reports & dashboards: Build beautiful reports, interactive dashboards, KPIs, forecasts and cash projections, then export to PDF, Excel, Google Sheets or Word, or share live links.
Run powerful consolidations: Combine unlimited entities, add eliminations, account for acquisitions and disposals, include fractional ownership and create group reports, with support for 170+ currencies.
Enhance your data: Combine Xero with Square, Shopify, Stripe and other sources, and augment financial reporting with operational and non-financial data via Excel or Google Sheets.
Mayday: Core Automation Layer
For in-house finance teams and multi-entity groups, month-end is still dominated by manual work identifying transactions, calculating adjustments, and posting journals.
The close can take 7.5 days each month, delaying management information and consuming team capacity.
Mayday reduces this manual load with one-click automation across two areas:
Intercompany processes: Balance intercompany loans, automate recharges, and reconcile transactions across your group.
Core accounting: Automate the creation and recognition of your deferred revenue and prepayment schedules.
Close management: If Mayday is the automation engine, Easy Month End from Mayday is the command centre, empowering teams visibility and ownership over the close through structured workflows and real-time tracking.
This deep integration with Xero is backed by Mayday’s status as Xero People’s Choice App of the Year 2025 and its go-to-market partnership with Xero.
As Angad Soin, Xero’s Managing Director, ANZ & Global Chief Strategy Officer, puts it:
“Mayday’s products complement Xero and help scaling finance teams save time and reduce friction in their month-end processes.”
Building a tech stack with Mayday
With 74 How I Stacked It stories featuring Mayday, you can explore more examples of how real finance leaders combined Xero + Mayday + best-in-class apps to scale without an ERP in the App Map 2.0.
This article is an extract from CFO Techstack's State of the Stack 2026.
Khalid Ahmed, CFO at EncompaaS, shares his tech stack.
EncompaaS is an enterprise AI data platform that helps large enterprise and regulated organisations govern, prepare and enrich data for the AI era with confidence. EncompaaS has 4 entities across 3 countries: EncompaaS Software Limited (global head company in Australia), EncompaaS Pty Ltd (R&D entity in Australia), EncompaaS Limited (UK operations) and EncompaaS LLC (US operations).
Khalid Ahmed, CFO, explains that, "with Xero, each of the organisations have their own complexities and their requirements, but it is very simple to integrate what you need into it." He also looks to the future with positivity: "the app ecosystem around it is great, but it's also changing so rapidly that as we scale our business and as our processes change, I know that there will be something that is more than likely to fit our requirements."
Here's what Khalid and his team are using:
Mayday for Deferred Revenue & Prepayments: I was looking at apps to automate our deferred revenue and our prepayments schedules as we have a few across the different entities and we're moving away from spreadsheets. Since Mayday brought out these tools, I've stopped looking and can’t wait to be using this across all of our entities!
Mayday for Intercompany: We have a group treasury function, and have expenses that come in and out of every single organisation with about 8 different intercompany loans. When Mayday came along it was a game changer! Suddenly we could track all of the intercompany transactions and easily carry out reconciliations across the group from one interface. The team live within the Balancer and BRAG functions daily.
Harvest for Project Management:Harvest has been great for our project management. We carried it over from when we used to own a consulting business within the group, even though we have much less client project management these days as we utilise implementation partners for our software. It’s still a must-have tool to track both our client and internal projects.
Mosaic for FP&A: Mosaic is a bit more advanced and a bit more expensive than some of the other Xero apps, but what I like about it is that it can pull information from multiple data sources (e.g. CRM, HRIS, csv files, etc.) and from all of your different Xero entities on a real granular transaction level. As part of the onboarding, you work with their FP&A specialists to integrate your pre-existing financial models into their app which then helps automate a lot of the data gathering, allowing you to spend more meaningful time on the forecasting and planning itself.
Keen to share how you stack it? Email: emily.lockyer@getmayday.com
Thurs 16th April, 3.15pm BST - Online | Register here
For years, the default growth playbook has been simple: Outgrow your accounting system → implement an ERP.
But is that still true?
Off the back of the State of the Stack 2026 report, surpassing 1,000 downloads, David Tuck, Kate Hayward and Kevin Appleby will be joined by Felix Matthews to challenge one of the biggest assumptions in modern finance.
They'll explore:
Why many scaling businesses are reconsidering the “ERP moment” and building best-in-class stacks around Xero instead
What the State of the Stack 2026 data reveals
How modern finance teams can use Xero + specialist apps to achieve reporting depth, operational control and month-end efficiency
The real trade-offs between ERP implementation and a modular stack
🧵 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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