Building a finance stack for your first 20 hires
Which tools you need, which you can skip, and how to set up approvals before spending gets away from you.
Your first twenty hires are when financial habits set in. Get the foundations right and they scale with you; get them wrong and you spend next year untangling them. Here is the stack we recommend.
The essentials
- A business account with virtual cards, so every teammate can spend within limits you control
- Invoicing and payments connected to your books, not bolted on
- An accounting ledger that reconciles itself from your bank feeds
- Payroll that posts to the ledger automatically
What you can skip for now
Enterprise planning tools, complex procurement suites and custom data warehouses can wait. At this stage they add process without adding clarity.
Set up approvals before you need them
The easiest time to introduce spending limits is before anyone is used to spending freely. Start simple:
- Cards with monthly limits per team
- Manager approval for bills above a set amount
- Founder approval for anything recurring
Report monthly, forecast weekly
Send a one-page monthly report to your board and investors, and look at cash runway every week. When the numbers live in one place, both take minutes.
The best finance stack is the one your team actually uses. Choose fewer tools that talk to each other.
Paydesk brings banking, cards, payments, bills and reporting together, so your first twenty hires can move fast without losing sight of the numbers.
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