We’re incredibly proud to share that Iridium has been named Xero Digital Practice Champion of the Year 2026!
On a chilly Thursday evening, the Iridium team headed to The Bay Hotel in Camps Bay for the Xero Awards. It was a pretty special evening spent catching up with friends from across the industry, celebrating some brilliant accounting practices and, after hearing our name called, dancing the night away with a shiny new award to take home.
And while we’re very happy to have another trophy for the cabinet, what we’re most proud of is what sits behind it.
Always looking for a smarter way
From day one, we’ve wanted to build an accounting practice that does things differently.
That means embracing technology, challenging the way things have always been done and continually looking for smarter ways to work. Not for the sake of using the latest shiny new tool, but because the right technology can create better efficiencies for our team and, ultimately, a better service for our clients.
Going into 2026, we already had strong foundations in place. We had established service delivery frameworks, client roadmaps and years of institutional knowledge and experience behind us.
But we also spotted an opportunity.
Our team is made up of highly skilled finance professionals who are at their best when they’re analysing, advising, problem-solving and helping clients make better business decisions. Yet, as with many finance teams, a significant amount of their time could still be taken up by the mechanics of producing the work before those valuable conversations could even begin.
So we asked ourselves: what if we could shift where that effort goes?
From good foundations to a smarter system
Rather than simply introducing AI tools into the business and hoping everyone found a way to use them, we took a much more intentional approach.
We started with something we already had: our own expertise.
Over the years, Iridium has developed frameworks and methodologies across financial planning and analysis, strategic finance and financial control. We began exploring how AI and automation could work alongside these established frameworks to make our knowledge easier to access, our processes more efficient and our outputs more consistent.
Importantly, this wasn’t an innovation project happening somewhere on the sidelines. It was led by an experienced member of our fractional CFO team who understood the work, the judgement it requires and the realities of delivering it to clients.
We then brought the wider team along for the ride through Masterclasses, one-on-one sessions and, most importantly, applying the technology to real challenges they were encountering in their day-to-day work.
Instead of asking people to use AI because it was the latest thing, we showed them where it could genuinely make their working lives better.
And that’s when things started to get really interesting.
More time for the work that matters
Today, technology is helping us significantly reduce the time spent on some of the more execution-heavy parts of our work.
One example is financial model reviews. A process that could previously require up to a week of senior time can now, with the support of one of our custom-built workflows, be completed in under 20 minutes.
We’ve also digitised and streamlined parts of our GAP Analysis, which assesses 128 different areas of a client’s finance function and helps us identify where the biggest opportunities for improvement lie.
The goal isn’t to remove people from the process. Quite the opposite.
By reducing the time our team spends pulling information together, building structures and doing first-principles research, we can spend more of that time applying judgement, asking better questions and having the strategic conversations that actually help businesses move forward.
And that has opened up another opportunity we’re particularly excited about.
Making fractional CFO support accessible to more businesses
Traditionally, high-level financial support can be difficult for smaller and growing businesses to access.
They may not need, or be ready for, a full-time CFO. They might not even need several days of CFO support every month. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t benefit from experienced financial thinking around cash flow, forecasting, reporting, strategy and growth.
By changing the way we deliver the work behind the scenes, we’ve been able to significantly reduce our cost to deliver while maintaining the quality and consistency we expect from our team.
The result?
We can now offer meaningful fractional CFO support from as little as 10 hours per month.
That’s a threshold that was previously tricky to make commercially viable.
For us, this is one of the most exciting outcomes of the project. Innovation isn’t just about doing the same work faster. It’s about asking what becomes possible when you do.
In this case, it means giving more growing businesses access to the kind of financial expertise and strategic support that can help them make better decisions, without needing a full-time CFO.
So, what’s next?
Winning Xero Digital Practice Champion of the Year is a pretty special milestone for Iridium, but we don’t see digitisation as a project with a finish line.
Technology will keep changing. The tools will keep getting better. And we’ll keep experimenting with how we can use them to push the boundaries of what an accounting, advisory and automation practice can offer.
Because ultimately, innovation for us isn’t about having the fanciest tech stack.
Using technology intelligently gives our people more time to think, gives our clients better support and makes the financial side of running a growing business a little simpler.
And if we can pick up the occasional trophy along the way, we certainly won’t complain 😉
Want to see what a more modern approach to accounting and advisory could look like for your business?
Find out more about Iridium’s accounting, advisory and fractional CFO services, and how our team can partner with you as your business grows.
