The team
Senior by default. A named human signs.
There is no pyramid here. The person who scopes your engagement is the person who does the work and signs the pack. Chartered Accountants who have closed rounds, managed lenders, sat on boards and been personally accountable for a set of accounts.
The people
Who you actually get.
Most finance firms sell you a partner and deliver a graduate. The economics of that model require it. Ours do not: the platform does the processing, so the person on your engagement is the senior one, and their time goes to judgement rather than keying.
Richard Chew
CA · Founder
Chartered Accountant, PwC-trained, with more than twenty years as a chief financial officer and board adviser across listed and private companies in media, entertainment, fintech and martech. Has run finance functions through capital raises, acquisitions, offshore expansion and exits, and has sat on the other side of the table in board and advisory roles.
Founded XLCFO to rebuild the finance function around software that fixes the thing he kept watching break: good companies making expensive decisions on late, unreliable numbers.
Chartered Accountants, on call
Behind every engagement sits a review gate. Nothing reaches a board, a lender or a revenue authority without a Chartered Accountant reading it and putting their name to it — including the work the agents did.
When an engagement outgrows the person on it, the escalation is to another senior human, not to a queue.
Eight specialists, supervised
Ledger, Compliance, Close, Reporting, Forecast, Capital, Governance and Controller do the processing that used to consume a finance team's week.
They are not staff and we do not pretend otherwise. They are tools with a named accountable human in front of them.
Meet the agentsExperience
Where our people have worked.
Twenty years of finance careers leave a trail. These are organisations our people have worked in, or worked alongside, across their careers before and outside XLCFO — listed multinationals, private companies, agencies and funds, in New Zealand and offshore.
Media, entertainment & sport
Fox Sports · Live Nation · Les Mills International · 90 Seconds · Mahi Tahi Media
Telecommunications & professional services
Orange · PwC
Capital & investment
Sequoia Capital
Consumer & hospitality
Allpress Espresso
Listed as career experience of our people, not as XLCFO client engagements, and not as an endorsement by any organisation named. Company names are the property of their respective owners and are used here descriptively. Client engagements are confidential and we do not name clients without their written permission.
How we work
Four things that follow from being senior.
You get the decision-maker
The person who scopes it does it. No handover to someone you have not met, and no rediscovering your business every January.
Show the working
Every number traces to a source and every assumption is written down. If we cannot explain how we got there, we have not finished.
Say no
To engagements we are not right for, to positions we cannot defend, and to the number a founder wants when the evidence says otherwise.
Build to be left
The goal is a company that no longer needs us in the seat — documented, systematised and transferable to your own hire.
Talk to the person who would actually do the work.
A discovery call is a conversation with a Chartered Accountant about your numbers, not a sales call with a qualifier. If we are not the right firm, we will tell you in that call.