Month-end close is still one of the most labour-intensive parts of running a finance function. In small and mid-sized businesses, teams often spend days reviewing ledger transactions, keeping spreadsheet schedules up to date and posting manual journals before they can report a single number with confidence. AI-powered month-end close automation changes that. It handles the repetitive work of finding, calculating and posting adjustments, which frees finance professionals to focus on analysis, business partnering and decision support. As companies scale and take on more entities, currencies and reporting demands, a faster and more reliable close becomes a competitive advantage rather than a back-office nice-to-have.
In the Mayday segment of the Intelligent Finance Operations Tech Showcase, David Tuck, Founder & CEO of Mayday, showed how the platform aims to “mend month end.” Tuck is a qualified accountant who trained at Deloitte, has served as a startup and SME CFO, and previously founded the receivables automation company Chaser. He walked through Mayday’s close management control centre and its AIR (artificially intelligent recognition) technology, which automates deferred revenue, prepayments, accruals, flux analysis and intercompany processes. Mayday serves the mid-market segment of the SMB space on Xero and QuickBooks Online. It offers close orchestration comparable to enterprise tools such as FloQast, BlackLine and Numeric, and it also automates the underlying accounting jobs.
The session ended with a discussion about where AI fits in finance operations. Tuck described a “trustworthy path to agentic month end” that moves from manual to assisted to agentic. He stressed that AI should act as a junior worker while finance teams keep control and final approval. Both speakers agreed that accounting demands precision and consistency, which Tuck called “a binary sport in a world of edge cases.”
Highlights:
- Mayday’s AIR technology finds transactions that need deferred revenue or prepayment adjustments, calculates how to spread them, and posts journals to the ledger in one click, so spreadsheet schedules are no longer needed.
- The platform detects missing accruals, such as approved purchase orders with no matching bill. It then automatically matches incoming bills to open accruals so they can be released quickly.
- Intercompany reconciliation reaches more than 99.9% matching accuracy across entities and currencies. Rule-based recharge automation cut more than two weeks from one customer’s month-end close.
- Mayday reports a 98% time saving on historically manual month-end processes and moves recurring tasks into real-time workflows that bring teams closer to a zero-day close.
- Mayday has won the Xero Global People’s Choice Award two years running. Australian business RSGX ($500M turnover, 13 entities) dropped a Microsoft Dynamics migration after spending $400,000 on implementation fees and chose a Xero and Mayday stack instead.
- Tuck also leads the CFO Tech Stack community, which now has more than 13,000 members and produced the State of the Stack report with GrowCFO.
