We walked the desk with the CFO.
The CFO showed us where receipts arrive, how each line gets classified, what comes off wages and where the hours went. The proposal went out the same day. 13 March 2026.
The training firm · Training & consulting · Live
The Finance Assistant clears the receiptsand the CFO makes the decisions.
One CFO ran the whole finance desk alone for eight years, on more than 70 receipts a month from the UK and Switzerland. The Finance Assistant now reads every receipt, applies the VAT treatment and prepares the entry in Xero. The CFO reads and signs off the exceptions.
The first call is free
Anonymised proof
The client is not named here, by agreement. Struan will not write a testimonial on a client's behalf, so there is no testimonial either. Ask on the call and we open the real work on a shared screen.
Before we started
The CFO ran the finance desk alone for eight years.
The training firm runs training and consulting work across the UK and Switzerland. Every consultant spends money on the job. Every expense arrives on one desk, the CFO's.
Receipts arrive as photos, as emails, as SharePoint uploads and sometimes as paper in the post. Each receipt needs the right UK VAT treatment, the right classification and a matching client or project before a line reaches Xero. Month-end adds the co-founder's company credit card, with a statement to chase, match and invoice on.
We counted more than 70 receipts a month, arriving by four routes and needing one of three classifications: client-billable, business expense, or deducted from wages. One person did the whole job, every month, for eight years.
Nine skills from the library carry the receipts now.
Discovery to liveOne Two Three Four
We went from first walkthrough to live in fifteen days.
The proposal went out on the day of the first walkthrough. Fifteen days after signature the Finance Assistant was running the desk.
The client signed phase 1.
Phase 1 covered the finance inbox, written up as a real job description with committed outputs, a weekly cadence and the CFO named as approver. 24 March 2026.
We composed the role and wired the role into Xero.
A workflow walkthrough narrowed the scope to UK VAT only. We composed the Finance Assistant from nine library skills, then gave the role its own Microsoft 365 licence and its own inbox, like any new starter. Wiring into Xero followed, with the client's managed IT provider in the loop. 30 March to 10 April 2026.
The Finance Assistant went live.
Receipts are processed as they arrive, drafts are staged in Xero, and a named person at Struan reads and signs the Friday summary. Phases 2 to 5 cover debtor chasing, customer records, financial reporting and multi-entity support, and sit scoped in the roadmap. April 2026.
Phases 2 to 5 are already scoped.
The composition
Nine skills from the library do one job.
Routine receipts no longer reach the CFO. Every receipt still reaches Xero correctly treated, correctly classified and matched to the right client or project. What reaches the CFO now is the handful of lines that need a decision.
The Finance Assistant is composed from nine of the 59 skills in the Struan library, each tuned to the training firm's rules, thresholds and chart of accounts. The Finance Assistant watches a dedicated inbox and reads every receipt whatever the format, working out the consultant and the country. The Finance Assistant then applies the UK VAT treatment and classifies the line as client-billable, a business expense, or a deduction from wages.
Every Xero entry is prepared as a draft. A person reviews and posts every draft, every time. Unusual lines wait for the CFO, and so does every line over £500. Each Friday the processing summary arrives, read and signed by a named person at Struan.
- OCR / receipt parsing
- VAT class detection
- Xero API posting
- Anomaly flagging
- Expense-policy check
- Bank-feed reconcile
- Approval-gate workflow
- Month-end packaging
- Weekly activity report
- + 50 more in the library
Nine skills run the finance desk today. The other 50 skills in the library wait for the next role.
A named person at Struan signs the work every Friday.
The gates
Three gates stop the work for a person.
We agreed every gate before a single line reached the ledger. The client set the thresholds, and the gates hold without exception.
The Finance Assistant caught a duplicate invoice.
A supplier invoice arrived twice. The Finance Assistant caught the duplicate before posting and held the invoice for a person to decide.
Every line over £500 waits for the CFO.
Every unusual line waits too, whatever the value. The rule is the client's, and the gate holds the rule without exception.
A person posts every Xero entry.
The Finance Assistant prepares every entry as a draft. A person reviews the draft and posts the draft. The boundary was set on day one and has not moved.
Nothing reaches the ledger without a person saying yes.
The numbers
These figures come from the signed scope.
The figures below are commitments from the signed scope and the proposal, rather than measured results. The weekly report carries the live measurement.
8-12 hrs
freed weekly for the CFO, per the signed scope
74%
cost saving versus a part-time finance hire, per the proposal
95%+
categorisation accuracy, the committed target
15 days
from signature to live
The CFO keeps the judgement calls and the Finance Assistant runs the rest of the desk.
We can run your finance deskthe same way.
The first call is free