What Should Your FinOps Tech Stack Be? 2025 Edition

With new tools coming out every other month and rapid feature development, it can be hard to know how to set up your FinOps infrastructure. We break down our favorites below.

As we prepare to enter the back half of 2025 and the intensity of the AI race increases at breakneck speeds, many founders are wondering what tools they should be using to manage their finances and back-office operations.

While the promise of “full automation” for many aspects of accounting, finance, and operations is looming, we are still far away from a single tool, model, platform, or company serving as your robot CFO / COO that will perform everything required automatically. As it stands today, our recommendation for inception to Series B startups is to compile a “Financial Operations Tech Stack” of the following tools and integrate them as much as possible to take advantage of their semi-automation features.

Accounting

The gold standard in accounting tools; there are other options but the key here is integrations. Intuit has done a good job buying market leading tools and adding them to their platform (e.g. OneSaaS -> app integrations). Having a platform that can connect directly to other systems such as your payroll software, inventory management system, Amazon business account, Shopify account, Amazon seller account, Paypal, Venmo, and bank feed is key. Plus general market share and preference from accounting firms means if you want to learn a system it should be QBO.

Post Series B when you have a much larger organization (or if you have complex inventory processes), it may make sense to transition to NetSuite, but given the annual fees, implementation costs, and expertise required, this transition generally happens north of $50M+ annual revenue.

Payroll

Payroll is an example of something that has gone from a very manual process to almost completely automated in a span of 10 years. The key here is to set it up right from the beginning, because payroll is one thing you really don’t want to screw up. Gusto is our favorite platform given the ease of use, direct integration to QBO with complex mapping abilities, phenomenal reporting capabilities, and the fact that there are rarely any issues. Rippling is another slightly more robust platform, which also has a PEO option. Both are good options, though Rippling is less transparent with pricing, the setup is more custom and therefore more cumbersome, and the reporting features are clunky and non-intuitive. Gusto is a stellar payroll platform that can also do benefits well. Rippling is a full HRIS. Justworks is a rising star in the area but is yet to hit the market adoption of the other two. Anything else is trash. And yes, that includes ADP.

Medical Benefits

ICHRA/QSEHRA

Another industry that is getting eaten by software automation is benefit brokers. Unless you have 50+ employees any pricing advantage you could gain using a local broker that can get better deals is almost certainly overshadowed by the time spent dealing with open enrollment, helping employees process claim issues, and onboarding and offboarding from plans. Just pick a plan offered by Gusto or Rippling and let the software tools do the work. It reduces human error on all sides and makes your life easier.

Another option that has gained popularity with rising healthcare costs is setting up health reimbursement arrangements like an ICHRA or a QSEHRA. Especially if you have a distributed workforce, this can be nice because folks can pick the plan they want in the region they live in and that fits their needs. Plus, you have predictability by having a flat cost per employee / couple / family that makes forecasting easier. We recommend Take Command Health for this.

Retirement

Guideline is hands down the best retirement platform out there. The ease of use for employees, plus the direct integration to Gusto or Rippling makes it perfect for reducing overhead. Again, if you set it up right from the beginning and integrate it properly it truly is “set it and forget it”. No more managing cash transfers manually or paying thousands a year for someone to manage. Human Interest is another popular platform that promises the same things as Guideline: avoid it like the plague. We have had multiple issues over the years with only a handful of clients, most of whom had trouble accessing or rolling over their funds and being sent down customer service rabbit holes.

FP&A (i.e. Forecasting)

If you read our post on startup forecasting you know what huge fans we are of Fathom. This is one of the hottest and rapidly developing spaces in fintech land. There are dozens of platforms at this point but the scenario planning, report creation, and data visualization features of Fathom put it heads and shoulders above the rest.

Credit Cards / Bill Pay

The trajectory at which ramp is reshaping how we do business is mind-numbing. This is the second most important tool that we implement after the actual accounting system. New founders often don’t see the advantage immediately of having credit cards on ramp versus their bank, or workflows for bill pay that have strong financial controls and audit logs. However, when your organization is at 10, 20, or 50 people, you realize that these features allow you to decentralize spend control by relying on directors and department heads to manage spend while still having full visibility into spend in real time which holds people accountable. When you reach 50+ people the operational efficiencies start to mount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Plus the UX is beautiful and employees love it. In short, this platform is every COO and accountant’s dream. Brex used to have a chokehold on this corner of the market with their cards and banking but they stagnated while ramp got better and better. ramp also recently launched banking and treasury, the one thing last Brex had over them. See below for more.

Banking

After the SVB crash startups split pretty much into two camps for banking, either it was JP Morgan because it’s “too big to fail” or Brex and Mercury because they are more of a financial platform versus a traditional bank and offer millions in FDIC insurance. Given the issues with Brex discussed above, and the fact that JP Morgan doesn’t give two sh*ts about you until you have $20M in the bank, we highly recommend Mercury for both small and mid-size teams. If you need working capital or are looking to finance CapEx, you may want to also have a small brick and mortar bank who cares about your $100k line of credit or $500k equipment loan.

While ramp recently added banking features, Mercury recently added bill pay, SAFE note creator, a QBO integration from the Mercury side (QBO bank feed always existed). We will likely see these frenemies try to outcompete each other in the coming years, and we’ll see which product team can meet the needs best. Right now we recommend Mercury for banking with ramp for bill pay and cards.

Cap Table / 409a

Not unlike QBO being the gold standard given its robustness and market share, Carta similarly has the largest familiarity between legal firms, investors, and accounting teams. It may be slightly higher price than other cap table management systems like Cake, Pulley, or AngelList, but it’s the gold standard, so use it. The Growth tier comes with one 409a valuation per year which is helpful and important to keep up to date for option issuances.

Business Insurance

Not technically FinOps, but worth discussing here given how bad traditional insurance brokers are at working with startups. FounderShield has more intense applications for General Liability / Product Liability, Errors and Omissions, Directors and Officers, and Cyber Insurance; however, their software platform can turn around policies within hours versus weeks and they have saved some of our clients tens of thousands of dollars annually by finding better policies given their familiarity with startups.

Payroll Tax Registrations / Registered Agent / State Annual Reporting

While your payroll platform should take care of all tax filings, you need to first register with the Secretary of State and get various payroll tax IDs (could be two, could be ten depending on the state). You are also frequently required to file a basic annual report. Some states like Delaware require a more complex annual franchise tax filing that requires accounting info. You may also want to get registered agents in each state if you don’t have a physical office so that mail goes there instead of, for example, an employee's residential address. If you’re unsure if the ~$200 / year is worth it, imagine a junior engineer emailing you a picture of a subpoena notice delivered to their house, then decide. We like CorpNet for its suite of services and also direct integration with Gusto if you don't have an accountant that is a Corpnet partner.

What is on the horizon

The most interesting piece that AI has brought to the table over basic automation in recent months is the ability to hold memory, and therefore improve its ability to “think” like a human. That is to say—practically—it can get instructions for a task, take feedback, improve on that task, reason with itself to make decisions and take action. Then also rinse and repeat without ever getting bored or burnt out.

*Note: em dashes are a personal writing choice, not from Chat GPT.

AI agents are already replacing lots of manual labor hours in software development. Small 3 to 5 person teams are doing what it took 20 to 30 person teams to do only a year or two ago. We’re starting to see the rumblings of this in the FinOps space. TBD if we see generalist AI agents that use tools like humans, or if the tools themselves will flush out their AI agentic features. Potentially, someone completely upends the industry with a different approach. Regardless, we’re excited. We’re in the wildest time to be in FinOps since Excel and the PC came around and we are here for it.