Every building carries a hidden cost that never shows up on the invoice - the carbon poured into its concrete, steel, glass and transport, locked in before anyone moves in. Cerclos exists to measure that cost and bring it down. The Perth software company builds the lifecycle assessment tools that architects and engineers use to design lower-carbon buildings, railways and infrastructure, and its work has reached net-zero projects in more than 100 countries. One of them was in Antarctica. It's a genuinely world-changing mission, and Chris de Josselin was brought in as CEO to scale it. The software was world-class. The finance function hadn't kept up
The company started with two sustainability engineers and a frustration. They were completing lifecycle assessments for clients by hand, slow and repetitive work, and they were certain there was a better way to do it. So they built one. eTool, the flagship product, grew out of that early attempt, and fifteen years on it models whole-life carbon on everything from apartment towers to rail corridors. The company now works across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. What hasn't changed is why any of it exists
"We're saving the planet. We just happen to be doing that with some really cool tech," Chris says. "It's all about making sure we're leaving the planet in a better place than when we got here"
That's the mission he arrived to scale. Cerclos has spent the past few years deliberately reshaping itself from a consultancy-flavoured operation into a true software company built to grow, so its tools can influence how a far larger slice of the built environment gets designed. Big ambitions need solid foundations, and fifteen years of organic growth had left the books passing through a lot of hands, with no one ever really owning them
"The financial side, it was a mess," Chris says. "We'd gone from the founders doing the books, to insourced, to outsourced, to insourced again. And it was a risk I was not willing to carry as I took the helm"
Not just a bookkeeper
When he went looking for help, Chris wasn't after someone to tidy the ledger. He was after a different kind of thinker, someone who could see the whole business, not just its bank feed
"I wasn't just looking for a bookkeeper, or someone to support us with payroll," he says. "The thing that jumped out was the systems thinking, the tech side. How do we look at all our systems across the business and integrate them to give me the insights I need to make better decisions? Hence the call"
He'd read it right. That's what Digit is - system and design thinkers who happen to work through the finance function, rather than bookkeepers who happen to own a few apps. Chris was handed a team rather than a person. Ben on the bookkeeping, Sherie running payroll, and Terry, who took on the heavier job of restructuring the Xero file so it finally reflected where a growing software business was heading. Before long, most of Cerclos had stopped thinking of them as external at all
"They actually just feel part of the team," Chris says. "The rest of the team don't know they're outsourced"
There's a shared streak underneath it, which helped. Cerclos is out to leave the planet better than it found it, and Digit is a B Corp built around a similar belief, that a business should be measured by more than its margins
Throw it at them and see what comes back
The clearest picture of how Digit supports the mission has nothing to do with reconciliations. It's what happens when Chris has a half-formed idea and nowhere obvious to put it
"I can have a crazy CEO idea, and then it comes back solved," he says. "If I could do that across every part of the business, I'd be on a yacht right now"
The mechanics are almost mundane. Chris sends an email to Andrew or Scott with a rough thought and not much else, something like I want to see this, I'm not sure if it's right or how we get there. Limited detail, a loose sense of what he reckons good looks like. What comes back isn't a yes, and it isn't a shrug. It's the idea taken seriously, framed, pulled apart, pressure-tested against the numbers, and handed back as a couple of real options he can act on. That's the design thinking earning its keep, and it's the line between a supplier and a partner
"To me, that's the value," he says. "It's not just an outsourced bookkeeper. It's outsourcing a bunch of real deep thinking around what's best for our business"
That's the whole point of getting the finance right. It gets out of the way. Chris and his team don't burn their week chasing numbers or wondering who owns the books, which means they get to spend it on the thing that actually matters, building software that helps the world build better
"I feel like they're part of the Cerclos family," he says. "They give me all the insights I need, I don't have to go chasing for answers, always timely and accurate reporting. What more could you want?"
