Your weekly go-to guide to transform your finance function into a strategic powerhouse.
Welcome CFO Techstack Community 👋,
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Stackademy, our training and certification programme. It’s for finance leaders and consultants who want to build and scale complex finance functions on Xero and Mayday, without defaulting to an ERP.
In How I Stacked It, Cassie Bingham, Finance Manager at Douglas Chemists, takes us inside the tech stack supporting a 30-pharmacy network. She shares how the team is moving beyond transactional work to focus on reporting, analytics and strategic value.
And Harriet tackles the ERP question. When your business is growing and the pressure to migrate starts mounting, how do you know if you actually need one? She shares how to challenge the assumption and make the case for your existing stack.
FEATURED ARTICLE
Stackademy: How far can you really scale with Xero?
There comes a point as a business grows when its finance function starts asking more of its tech stack. More entities, more complex processes, more tools and more things that need to work together.
For years, the assumption has been that once things get complicated enough, it’s time to move from Xero to an ERP. And one thing ERP has always had in its favour is an ecosystem of consultants and implementers you can call on to help you build and run it. Xero hasn’t had that in the same way.
That’s why we’ve developed Stackademy: structured, certified courses for finance leaders and consultants. They’re designed to teach you how to build and run complex finance functions without needing an ERP.
The expertise is catching up
More businesses are staying on Xero for longer as they grow. Rather than spending the time and money migrating to an ERP, they want to build a finance tech stack around Xero and Mayday, with the right tools for their needs.
Historically, there weren’t enough businesses looking for help building complex Xero-based tech stacks for many people to specialise in it. That’s changing. More businesses need that expertise, but there still aren’t enough people who can provide it.
Learn how to build it yourself
Some finance teams already have capable people in-house. What they need is the framework: what’s possible on Xero and Mayday, which tools can solve different problems, where the limits are, and what other finance teams have learned along the way.
That’s where Scaling with Xero: Level 1 and Level 2 come in. Both are live now, covering areas from AP, spend management, payroll, intercompany, reporting, consolidation and month end to forecasting, accruals, deferred revenue, inventory, fixed assets, integrations and AI.
“I've just completed this course from CFO Techstack. Highly recommend it for anyone working in/with fast-growing Xero-based businesses! Looking forward to doing Level 2 of the certification.” Anna Page CA
Or learn how to build it for others
The other side of the equation is creating more people who can help businesses do this work. Implementer Basics (coming soon) is for consultants and advisors who want to deliver tech stack implementations themselves.
It covers the practical side of the job, including scoping, pricing, choosing apps, managing change and ongoing support. Completing Implementer Basics unlocks entry to the FTS Consultant Directory.
Whether you’re building your own finance stack or helping someone else build theirs, take a look at Stackademy and see what you can learn from the community.
COMMUNITY INSIGHTS
🎤 How I stacked it
Cassie Bingham, Finance Manager at Douglas Chemists
Douglas Chemists is a privately owned Australian community pharmacy network founded in Goulburn in 1972. Today, it operates 30 pharmacies across Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT under brands including Priceline Pharmacy, Discount Drug Stores, Good Price Pharmacy Warehouse and Soul Pattinson
Chemists, employing more than 600 people. At head office, a team of 12 spans finance, human resources and operations, supporting the network.
As part of Douglas Chemists' ongoing digital transformation journey, the business has outsourced its bookkeeping and payroll operations, freeing the finance team to move beyond transactional processing and focus on delivering strategic value. With a greater emphasis on reporting, analytics and data-driven decision making, the team is now better positioned to identify cost-saving opportunities, optimise business performance and provide actionable insights across the pharmacies it supports.
Here's what Cassie and her team are using:
Xero. Core accounting platform for Douglas Chemists, used across all 30 pharmacies for day to day bookkeeping and financial reporting.
Mayday. Supports month-end close, with a particular focus on managing and reconciling intercompany balances across the group.
Employment Hero. Payroll platform covering the business's 600+ employees, handling pay runs and related compliance requirements.
Eftsure. Used for audit and reporting purposes, helping the finance team verify payment details and reduce the risk of payment fraud.
Weel. Manages employee expenses, giving the team visibility and control over spending across the pharmacy network.
If you'd like to share your stack with the community, get in touch with kristin.morgan@getmayday.com.
GIVE ME HOPE
Reader’s question:
We are growing fast and the ERP conversation keeps coming up. I am not convinced we need one yet but I am struggling to push back on the pressure. How do I make the case for staying where we are?
Harriet’s answer
Start by being honest with yourself about why the pressure exists. Most of the time it isn't coming from a specific, unsolved problem. It's coming from a general sense that "companies at your stage move to an ERP." Maybe an investor said something similar in a board meeting. Maybe it's just the assumption everyone in the room seems to share. That's not a business case. It's a vibe.
We had this exact debate at Arbolus, and what I learned is that the mistake almost always happens at the decision stage, not the implementation stage. The first version is making the call on autopilot. "We're at X revenue, X headcount, X entities" isn't actually an answer to the question of why you need an ERP. If you can't name the specific problem you're solving, you're not ready to have that conversation yet.
The second is underestimating how long it takes. Finance teams are already stretched, and an ERP implementation is not a quick project. Even with external consultants, your own team still needs to find serious time for it, on top of everything else you're already doing. People don't factor that in until they're already knee-deep.
The third is assuming more features and more customisability automatically means better. It doesn't. Moving from something as intuitive as Xero to a complex ERP is a real shift for the people using it day to day, and that friction has a cost most people don't price in.
I'm not saying ERP is never the right call. Sometimes it is the answer. But it should be a specific, tested decision, not a default. So before you agree to anything, get specific. What's the actual problem? Consolidation across entities? Visibility for the board? A manual process that keeps breaking? In my experience, most of these have a stack-based solution long before they justify an ERP.
You don't have to work this out alone, either. One of the things I value most about the CFO Techstack community is that people have actually been where you are. Andy Colalillo at RSGx was four months into an ERP migration, fees already spent, when he recognised what was possible with a stack built around Xero and Mayday instead. He had the courage to change direction, which is harder than never starting the migration in the first place.
Andy Griffiths at Herts for Learning went the other way, moving a medium-sized organisation off Oracle NetSuite onto Xero. Neither of these are small, cautious businesses making an easy choice. They're finance leaders looking hard at complex organisations and deciding the ERP wasn't serving them.
If you want more proof points like theirs before you make your case internally, The State of the Stack report is worth a read. It's full of case studies of finance leaders at exactly this stage, making exactly this decision. Download it here.
That's also the strongest way to push back. Don't argue in the abstract. Bring the specific problem, how you'd solve it within your current stack, and proof that others have done it without an ERP. That's a much harder position to argue with than "I don't think we're ready."
Get that specific and, more often than not, you'll find the answer was already sitting in the stack you have.
Have a question you’d like Harriet to answer? Submit your questions here.
AWARDS
🏆 CFO Techstack Awards Webinar
We can’t wait to announce the winners of the CFO Techstack Awards!
Join us as we celebrate this year’s winners and the people, teams and solutions making an impact across the finance tech community.
🧵 This week's top threads, from The Stack Exchange
The Stack Exchange is the place to connect with peers, stay on top of the latest apps and industry news, and work through the challenges that don't have an easy answer.
Joiin adds a new direct integration with MYOB, allowing finance teams to automatically bring MYOB data into Joiin for consolidated, multi-entity reporting. Read more.
Stripe launches Stripe Treasury in Australia, bringing payments and global money management together for Australian businesses. Announced 19 August. Learn more.
Xero unveils new AI-powered workflows at Xerocon Denver, including a new XeroForce month-end agent and an OpenAI connector that will let customers use live Xero data within ChatGPT. Read more.
WHAT THE DATA SAYS
📊 Stat of the week
94% of UK finance leaders are prioritising stronger data governance, security and infrastructure to reduce disruption, compared with 86% globally. Source: Wolters Kluwer, 2026 Future Ready CFO UK Report.
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