Your weekly go-to guide to transform your finance function into a strategic powerhouse.
Welcome CFO Techstack Community 👋,
This week, we're sharing the values behind CFO Techstack. As the community grows and we launch more ways to get involved, we wanted to put them on paper. Three things we want to hold onto: Community First, Raise the Bar, and Give and Take. Here's what they mean for everything we're building next.
In How I Stacked It, Michael Hunter from EIA Investments takes us inside the tech stack supporting 25+ legal entities. He shares how his team is using automation to manage the complexity.
We've also got Harriet tackling a big one: How do you move from Financial Controller to Head of Finance? It's more than a change in title. Your focus has to shift from running finance well to supporting the wider business, looking ahead, and leading your team. She breaks down what that shift actually looks like.
FEATURED ARTICLE
The values behind CFO Techstack
CFO Techstack is growing, with plenty more coming over the next few months. Before we get there, we wanted to put down on paper what matters to us and the community we’re building together.
A lot has changed since CFO Techstack first started. The community is bigger and there are far more ways to get involved. But what we value most hasn’t changed. It's what happens when you get smart people across finance teams, consultants, and apps talking to each other.
Finance leaders give us a peek under the hood of their tech stacks with How I Stacked It, inspiring others with how they’ve approached their own challenges. Members share hard-won lessons, ask questions, and make introductions - sparking connections we could never have planned.
This is what makes the CFO Techstack community so special. As we grow, we want to hold onto it. That’s why we’ve put into words the three values that matter most to us.
Community First
You’re the reason CFO Techstack exists. What’s best for the community comes first, whether we’re deciding where to focus our time or what to create.
We want CFO Techstack to be a place where you can have useful conversations, make connections, hear different perspectives and learn from other finance teams.
Raise the Bar
Good enough isn’t enough. If we put the CFO Techstack name on something, it should be worth your time.
That applies to the content we produce, the events we run, the partners we work with and the stories we tell. When we repeat something, we want it to be better. Every time.
Give and Take
The best knowledge in CFO Techstack comes from each of you.
The finance leader who shares their stack. The person who talks openly about an implementation that went wrong. The consultant who has seen the same problem five times before.
You get out what you put in. Our part is to keep creating reasons to show up, share and connect, and to celebrate the people who do.
There’s a lot coming
These values matter now because there’s plenty ahead.
Stackchat has just gone live, giving you a new way to tap into the knowledge across the community. Then, on 15 September, we’ll reveal the CFO Techstack Awards winners live and celebrate the people and companies making an impact across the community.
We launched State of the Stack earlier this year, built from real tech stacks shared by finance teams. Later this year, we’ll build on that with a new benchmarking report. Stackademy is coming too, with practical training and certification in building Xero-based tech stacks for growing finance functions.
Plus, we’re getting ready to bring the community together in person again, with events coming soon!
And then there’s Stack Exchange 2.0…We’re keeping the details of that one quiet for a little longer. Connection has always been a big part of what makes CFO Techstack tick, and there’s much more we want to do with it.
There’s a lot changing. What matters to us isn’t.
COMMUNITY INSIGHTS
🎤 How I stacked it
Michael Hunter, Group Financial Accountant at
EIA Investments, shares his tech stack.
Michael Hunter is Group AI & Automation Lead at EIA Investments, where he is part of a four-person finance team supporting multiple investments, many of which are themselves groups of companies, across more than 25 legal entities and multiple industries.
Xero remains at the heart of the finance stack, with tools like Mayday and Syft layered on top to help the team manage the complexity that comes with such a broad portfolio. Michael has been a driving force behind the team's use of automation. He's kept a strong focus on keeping data accurate and reconciled, speeding up reporting, and continually looking for new technology that can make the finance function work better.
Here's what Michael and his team are using:
Xero for core finance:Xero sits at the centre of our stack, with feeder applications bringing in bills, payroll, point-of-sale takings and payments, so very little is keyed in by hand.
Mayday for month end:Mayday manages intercompany activity across more than 25 legal entities, including intercompany entries and the on-charging of corporate costs.
Syft for reconciliations: Embedded into our Excel process, Syft gives us refreshable workpapers wired to Xero, so recs update themselves instead of being rebuilt from exports every month.
Make.com for automation:Make.com moves data into our data lake and handles daily Xero traffic: bank transactions, journals, invoices and payments, landing as drafts for review.
Power BI for monitoring:Power BI brings financial, operational and market data together with consistent business rules, showing the status of every Xero file on one screen.
Claude for AI:Claude builds data pipelines from our data lake and Xero, generating hosted dashboards that give us continuous reporting without an enterprise SaaS platform.
Power Automate for Office 365:Power Automate routes emails to the right entity in Dext, gathers dashboard inputs, triggers model refreshes and keeps watch over the environment.
Lightspeed for Point of Sale: Lightspeed runs point of sale across the hospitality and retail sites that use it, and posts through to Xero.
Bepoz for Point of Sale: Bepoz covers point of sale and venue operations at the venues that run on it, and posts through to Xero as well. Two platforms, one normalised sales view.
Stripe for payments:Stripe processes online payments, including customers paying Xero invoices directly.
Dext for document processing:Dext captures and processes bills, receipts and other documents before they reach our workflows.
Accuri for statutory reporting:Accuri imports trial balances from Xero to create draft financial statements.
WorkflowMax for time management:WorkflowMax tracks time across the portfolio, giving visibility across each investment group.
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:
I have just been promoted from Financial Controller to Head of Finance. The job title has changed but nobody has told me what that means for how I should be operating day to day. How do I make the shift?
Harriet’s answer
You're not doing the same job with a bigger title. You're doing a different one.
As a Financial Controller, you've spent your time on management and financial accounting, internal controls, statutory compliance, and keeping AP, AR and payroll running smoothly. It's a role built on precision and a strong internal focus.
Head of Finance flips that. From my experience, the biggest change is where your time goes. You'll spend far more of it outside finance than inside it, and other leaders will start coming to you to sense-check hiring budgets and new spend. Swap the finance hat for a finance umbrella. It needs to cover the whole business now, not just your team's output.
The fix is simple, even if it doesn't feel that way at first. Get regular time in the diary with the people who run the parts of the business you don't understand yet, weekly, biweekly or monthly, whatever fits. I've found a relaxed, informal chat gets you further than a scheduled meeting across a desk. You'll learn more about what the business actually needs in twenty easy minutes than in an hour on the agenda.
The second shift is from backward-looking to forward-looking. Historic numbers still matter, they're the foundation for everything else, but you'll increasingly be judged on the insight you build on top of them. If the financial model or forecast becomes your responsibility and FP&A isn't a skill you've built yet, get proper training for it. In my experience, trying to pick it up on the job while everything else about the role is also new is where people struggle most.
You're probably managing more people now too, and that's a job in itself. I've found managing well isn't just directing work, it's paying attention to what your team actually wants from their careers. I used to take each direct report for coffee once a week, no agenda beyond checking in on how they were doing. It's worth building that habit early, before the job gets busy enough that it starts to feel optional.
The title has changed. Let the way you spend your time change with it.
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.
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