Creative CFO has been named Xero Partner of the Year (Large Firm) for 2026 at a gala dinner in Cape Town. The firm, which supports high-growth businesses across southern Africa and the UK, has operated exclusively on Xero’s cloud accounting platform for over a decade. CEO Ian Meaker highlighted how cloud technology and AI have enabled the team to build advanced financial systems for SMEs.
Xero is the all-in-one accounting software platform used by over 5 million businesses worldwide. Creative CFO has been building finance functions for high-growth businesses in the southern Africa region and the United Kingdom, for over a decade.
Entries are open to Xero partner practices in South Africa. Xero notes the award recognises ‘the passion, innovation and dedication an entrant’s team brings to helping businesses thrive.’
Xero’s criteria for becoming a finalist: Creative CFO was also named in the select final line up in 2025. Xero’s judging panel shortlists finalists from the entries in each category.
Winners were announced at a recent gala dinner hosted by Xero in Cape Town. Key reasons behind Creative CFO’s landmark win for the past two years, include:
- The company’s long-standing dedication to cloud accounting ecosystem integration and unique model of supporting small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Creative CFO’s 100% commitment to the platform: Over a decade ago Creative CFO identified that the future of financial software lay with cloud computing. Today, 100% of Creative CFO’s customers run on Xero. The company will not engage with customers who will not transition to the cloud thus ensuring the entire Creative CFO team can focus deeply on a unified system stack rather than piecing fragmented software systems together. - Creative CFO CEO, Ian Meaker, explains the significance of this award to the company’s customers. Meaker says cloud and the exponential rise of AI, plus other factors, changed the level at which Creative CFO plays in the market. “It has radically multiplied our capacity, allowing us to graduate from professionals who simply do the work to architects who engineer the systems that deliver it. We’ve backed Xero for more than a decade, from before cloud accounting was the norm. Every Creative CFO customer runs on Xero, and we’ve turned down business opportunities on the basis that the companies in question would not commit to the move to Xero,” says Meaker.
He emphasises the award recognises that conviction. “For our current customer base, it translates into the highest endorsement of the skills level of our professional teams. This in turn further entrenches the trust these organisations place in us for a mission-critical aspect of their operations, namely their finance function. It also serves as an independent assurance to prospective customers that their financial systems will be run to global standards. In a nutshell this award translates into a very strong credibility signal for us, with Xero recognising Creative CFO out of its entire South African partner base,” he adds.
Meaker notes that while Xero gave them the platform what their team did with it is the part they are most proud of. “We are operating in a truly exciting time where finance and technology are intersecting, resulting in unprecedented opportunities for professionals in the field. Overall, the cloud presented us with a set of tools that were previously unavailable to SMEs plus a new opportunity to work collaboratively and efficiently across distance,” concludes Meaker.
