There is a version of finance advice that is technically correct and completely useless. You know the kind. The webinar panel where everyone agrees on best practice but it still feels like a sales pitch. The LinkedIn post explaining what good looks like from a very safe distance. The industry guide that assumes you already have the budget, the team, and the time to do everything it recommends.
That is not what this is.
I have spent the last ten years working in finance across some very different kinds of businesses: Big 4 audit, a company that got acquired by Workday, a portfolio of early-stage startups, and a scale-up where I grew from Financial Controller to VP of Finance. I have made decisions without a playbook, built processes from scratch, and navigated the kind of sustained pressure that eventually makes you book a one-way flight to Sri Lanka. A lot of it nobody told me to prepare for.
That gap, nowhere to go for candid, experienced advice, is what Give Me Hope is about.
Each week I’ll answer a question from this community. Whether you’re weighing up your current tech stack, wondering if an ERP is really the right step, trying to make sense of what AI can do for your finance function, or figuring out how to get more out of the tools you already have. This is the best place to ask.
No question is too basic or too niche. The ones I am most looking forward to, honestly, are the ones people do not feel comfortable asking in a room full of peers.
A bit about me
I qualified as a chartered accountant at PwC, auditing businesses including Rio Tinto. The standards were high, sometimes exhaustingly so, but it gave me a clear picture of what excellent finance looks like. A north star I have carried ever since, even when everything around it was considerably less polished.
From there I moved into the corporate world, then into the specific challenge of building finance functions from scratch for early-stage startups. That is where I first saw the same mistakes playing out across different businesses: finance treated as a back-office function, external accountants relied on for historical reporting and nothing else, tools left in a state of quiet neglect until the cost of sorting it all out became enormous. It's rarely dramatic. It just limits what a business can do, slowly and silently.
At Peakon, I joined a large, highly capable finance team and saw what a well-run finance function enables at the highest level. Peakton was acquired by Workday for $700 million in 2021. Clean books, strong data and rigorous controls made a real difference when the moment came.
Scaling Xero at Arbolus
At Arbolus I put all of it to work. I joined as Financial Controller in 2022 and left as VP of Finance in 2026, having taken the business from Series A through to Series B as revenue roughly doubled to around $20 million. We managed multi-entity accounting across the UK, Spain, India and the US without migrating to an ERP. We built on Xero-based stack with Mayday at the centre of it. Work that used to take days became a few clicks. It’s the approach I believe in and the one that I will talk about a lot in this column.
I left Arbolus earlier this year. The role had given me a great deal, but the sustained pressure and responsibility had taken a real toll. I took four months out, travelled through Sri Lanka and Peru, and gave myself the time to think clearly about what I wanted next.
Why CFO Techstack
Think of me as the expert in residence for CFO Teschstack. I’ve been where you are, and I’m here to put that experience to work for this community. If you’ve got a question, a challenge, or just want to sense-check something, I’m the person to come to.
It’s also a role that puts me at the centre of something I care about. For years the assumption has been that growing businesses eventually outgrow Xero and move to an ERP. That assumption is changing. Finance teams are proving it’s possible to scale further than anyone expected on a Xero-based stack at a fraction of the cost and complexity. I have lived that story. I want to help more finance leaders navigate it with confidence.
What this column is, and what it is not
It's not a corporate advice column. I will not be giving polished answers that cover every base and commit to nothing. I have opinions and I’ll share them.
It's not therapy. I’m not a coach or a counsellor. What I am is someone who has been in finance long enough to make mistakes, change my mind, and figure some things out the hard way. I want to put that experience to use.
More than anything, I want to humanise what a finance professional looks and feels like. The challenges, the doubts, the frustrations, the moments of not knowing what you are supposed to do next. They are normal, they are valid, and somebody else has been there.
If there’s a question you have been sitting on, this is the place for it. Something you cannot Google. Cannot raise in a meeting. Cannot ask without feeling exposed.
Submit your question here. Anonymous submissions are welcome. The best questions are usually the ones nobody else will ask out loud.
See you next week.
Harriet
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