Your weekly go-to guide to transform your finance function into a strategic powerhouse.
Welcome CFO Techstack Community 👋,
Last week, as part of The Word is Spreading series, we dived into a specific example of a large, complex business that has scaled far beyond what most would assume is possible on Xero: Tracksuit.
This week, we’re shifting our focus to the role that Advisors can play in spreading the word, not just by recommending systems, but by helping shape how they’re designed and scaled as complexity grows.
FEATURED ARTICLE
The Word is Spreading: The Advisor Advantage
For many finance leaders, the idea that ERP is the natural next step is already being challenged.
What’s becoming more interesting is how that thinking is spreading.
Increasingly, it’s being shaped by advisors working hands-on designing finance systems that prove you don’t need to leave Xero to operate at scale.
Amir Mirshams, Director at Vincents, works with many Australian businesses scaling well beyond the “SMB” label.
He consistently sees them succeed without making the jump to ERP, and his role is to design finance stacks that work in the real world as complexity increases.
For Amir, that means making calls on when to introduce new entities and how to structure them, how to connect systems across payroll, reporting, and operations, where automation adds value, and critically, whether businesses actually need to move to ERP.
What’s striking is that, from this vantage point, the conclusion isn’t what many would expect.
It’s not that these businesses are outgrowing Xero. It’s that the role of the advisor has evolved to ensure they don’t have to.
Beyond SMB: what growth actually looks like
Amir’s clients typically sit in the $10M–$200M revenue range, firmly in the mid-market, and are often complex:
Multi-entity structures driven by shareholders, risk and expansion
Global operations
Finance teams ranging from 1 to 20 people across accounting, payroll and reporting
Increasing use of multiple Xero organisations to support new entities
This is where many assume that systems begin to “break.” But Amir sees it differently:
“Adding entities and complexity is a natural outcome of growth, not a system failure.”
The ERP question
Despite operating at a level where ERP has typically been the default, Amir rarely advises it.
“In practice, I very rarely recommend an ERP system for businesses in this size range.”
Why?
“Most organisations between $10M and $200M don’t have the in-house capability to support ERP effectively. They’d need specialist resources, and it often introduces unnecessary cost and operational distraction.”
Amir explains that, while ERP platforms can be powerful, they’re built for organisations with substantially higher scale, dedicated internal system teams, and the capability to handle rigidity and long implementation cycles.
For mid-market businesses, that trade-off doesn’t stack up.
“For most mid-market businesses, the cost and rigidity outweigh the benefits.”
Why Xero continues to win
Instead of replacing Xero, Amir leans into it.
His reasoning is less about features and more about how modern finance teams actually operate
“I continue to recommend Xero because it aligns with how growing businesses work. Almost every finance professional knows it, talent is easy to find, and the flexibility is there to restructure and expand without reimplementing a core system.”
System capability matters, but people capability matters just as much.
ERP outcomes without ERP trade-offs
Amir’s approach isn’t “Xero alone”, it’s Xero as the core of a modular tech stack.
By connecting specialised tools via API, his clients can achieve scalable reporting, stronger financial control, automated processes and multi-entity visibility
In other words: ERP-level capability, without the ERP-level cost or rigidity.
Amir puts this clearly:
"A properly designed Xero tech stack can deliver ERP‑level capability for approximately $20,000–$30,000 per year, rather than hundreds of thousands for ERP implementations."
The power of the Techstack
A key theme across Amir’s work is modularity.
Unlike traditional ERP systems which are monolithic and tightly coupled, a modern stack built around Xero is composable, replaceable, scaleable and resilient.
"If one part of an ERP under-delivers, the whole organisation bears the cost. In a modular stack, you just replace it."
Growth without disruption
For CFOs, the impact is both operational and commercial:
"Staying on Xero allows businesses to continue growing without introducing unnecessary cost, complexity, or risk.”
Most importantly, it allows finance teams to scale without pausing the business to replatform.
Amir’s experience reinforces a broader trend we’re seeing across the CFO Techstack community:
👉 Businesses aren’t “outgrowing” Xero 👉 They’re outgrowing how they use it
With the right architecture, ecosystem, and mindset, complexity doesn’t require replacement, it requires better design.
And increasingly, advisors are playing a big part in bridging that gap.
Key takeaway
The modern finance stack isn’t defined by a single system. It’s defined by how well that system is designed, connected and evolved over time.
That design isn’t happening in isolation.
Advisors like Amir are playing a critical role in shaping how businesses scale: not by defaulting to ERP, but by architecting modular, real-world finance stacks that allow platforms like Xero to go much further than most expect.
COMMUNITY INSIGHTS
🎤 How I stacked it
René Lindeque, Intergroup Accounts Manager & Financial Accountant at Funda Group, shares her tech stack.
Rene Lindeque is the Intergroup Accounts Manager and Financial Accountant at Funda Group. They currently oversee approximately 30 intergroup companies, with a team of four focused specifically on managing intercompany transactions, reconciliations, and reporting. Rene oversees intercompany invoicing, loan account management, cross-company offsets, and ensures that all intergroup balances reconcile accurately.
Here's what René and her team are using:
Mayday for Month End: Mayday has been a game changer for managing intercompany transactions, particularly with intercompany invoicing and cross-company offsets. The BRAG function is especially powerful and saves a significant amount of time when reconciling loan accounts across multiple entities.
ApprovalMax for Approvals: ApprovalMax has significantly improved our approval workflows and billing processes. The AI feature that reads and captures bill data saves a considerable amount of time and reduces manual input. Overall, it has streamlined our controls and improved efficiency across the team. Just wish they would add better filters for searching for POs, and that POs could also be marked as paid/part paid. But overall great. Less paper work, easy trail for following up on invoices and quotes with employees and staff.
Syft for Reporting: Syft is a fantastic tool for management reporting. It provides clear, visual dashboards that make it easy to identify errors, track company performance, and support quick decision-making by management. It adds strong value from both a reporting and oversight perspective. I can easily do management reporting for the CEO on time, and it looks and reads well. We can also do reports where we combine the group, showing the business as a whole.
Hubdoc for Document Processing: With Hubdoc, you can import all your financial documents & export them into data you can use.
Caseware for Audit: Caseware is a global AI-powered platform that streamlines auditing, financial reporting and data analytics.
Keen to share how you stack it? Email: emily.lockyer@getmayday.com
🧵 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:
.png?upscale=true&width=1196&upscale=true&name=CFO%20Email%20banner%20(1).png)
