Xero Accounting Software has revealed that Creative CFO has won the 2026 Xero Partner of the Year (Large Firm).
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.’
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, saying 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.