The Accounting Tech Stack We Rely On (and Why)

​Choosing new software can overwhelm any accountant. The options feel endless, and each one costs real time and money to test. Building the right accounting tech stack takes years of trial and error. We know, because we have spent over a decade doing exactly that. Our firm has been fully remote since 2012.



That means we have tested, rejected, and adopted these tools inside real client work. Here is the stack we trust, so you can skip the guessing. You will notice we left AI off this list. We use it where it helps, but that is a topic for another day.


QuickBooks Online - Flexibility in Your Accounting Tech Stack

We tested Xero, NetSuite, and several other newer ledgers. Each one had real strengths. Each one also had weaknesses we could not live with. Some could not switch between accrual and cash methods. Others lacked invoicing or bill pay.


QuickBooks Online has its own quirks, and users will happily tell you about them. Still, its flexibility makes up for a lot. It remains the foundation of everything we build.


Avalara - Accuracy in Your Accounting Tech Stack

Avalara keeps our invoice calculations accurate on every job. It connects with QuickBooks Online cleanly. The correct line item lands on the invoice automatically.


QuickBooks can handle this too, but we have caught too many errors to rely on it. Accuracy, connectivity, and ease of use make this an easy pick for us.


Bill.com

Once you handle more than a few bills a month, manual payments slow you down. Bill.com runs the accounts payable side for us. It offers approval routing, a clean audit trail, and a QuickBooks sync we trust.

For a remote firm, the approval workflow is a huge win. Partners review and approve from anywhere. No one ever touches a paper check. We lean on it for higher-volume AP with multi-step approvals.


Financial Cents

Financial Cents is the tool that runs our firm. It handles practice management from top to bottom. Every client, task, deadline, and document request lives in one place. We use the proposal system too. Proposals and engagement letters sit right next to the work itself. When you have no office to walk across, you need one source of truth. The secure client document request feature is a bonus we love.


Gusto

Clients assume payroll is simple. It rarely is. We landed on Gusto because everything else turned into a headache. Some payroll tools would not sync to QuickBooks, which left us fixing entries by hand. Others offered poor support when problems came up. Gusto syncs cleanly, and its support shows up when we need it. Running payroll and benefits feels painless. That matters when we onboard clients remotely.


Ramp

Ramp is the tool we get most excited about. The entry tier is free, and it includes bill pay comparable to Bill.com. The cost argument alone is strong. The real win is the corporate cards. Every employee gets one, and managers set spend controls by amount and category.

Here is why the cards stand out for us:


  • Managers can block specific purchase types, so a rule against alcohol simply stops that charge from going through.
  • Receipt capture happens automatically, or a user can text a photo to Ramp to submit it in seconds.

We reserve Ramp's bill pay for simpler needs already bundled with the cards. Taking the monthly expense scramble off everyone's plate is a quiet game changer.


Practice Protect

A fully remote firm carries one big responsibility. We protect client financial data across a team that never shares a room. Practice Protect manages access control, identity, and login security. It is the least glamorous tool here. It is also the one we would never drop. A single compromised login in this field is a disaster. This is how we sleep at night.


Honorable Mentions

A few smaller tools earn a spot for the specific jobs they do well.


Grasshopper

Grasshopper gives us a real business phone number that rings anywhere. We have no office, yet clients still reach a professional line with proper call handling.


Zapier

Zapier is the glue of our stack. When two tools will not talk natively, it connects them. It automates the repetitive handoffs, so no one copies data by hand. Its CoPilot feature even helps build automations faster.


Ready to Put Your Accounting Tech Stack on Solid Ground?

The right tools only matter when the right team runs them. We are First Steps Financial, a fully remote fractional accounting department for service businesses earning $1M to $25M in revenue. We handle your books through controller-level reporting and analysis. Your revenue comes from labor and expertise, so we track the levers that decide your margins.



Think capacity, utilization, project profitability, and AR management. You never outgrow your books, and we make sure they scale with you. Reach out today, and let us build the financial foundation everything else sits on.


Frequently Asked Questions

How often should we review our accounting tools?

Review your stack at least once a year. Your needs shift as you grow. A tool that fit at $1M may strain at $10M. An annual check keeps your systems matched to your size.

Do these tools work for teams that still use an office?

Yes. We chose them for remote work, but they help any team. Cloud access, clean audit trails, and automation benefit everyone. An office does not change their value.

Will more software replace the need for a skilled accountant?

No. Tools speed up the work, but they do not interpret it. Someone still needs to read the numbers and guide decisions. Good software makes a good accountant faster, not optional.

How hard is it to switch from one platform to another?

It depends on your data and history. A clean migration takes planning and testing. Rushing it risks lost records and messy balances. We suggest mapping every account before you move anything.


Some of the links above are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we actually use and pay for ourselves.


Our Latest Insight

Growth Impacts: Why This Relationship Breaks Down at $2M to $15M (And What It Costs You)

By Alisa McCabe • October 15, 2026
​There is a frustrating stage of growth when the business makes more money and becomes harder to run. You expected growth to create leverage. Instead, your calendar is fuller and decisions take longer. Projects compete for the same people. Expenses become harder to explain. Accounting needs more information from Operations. Operations needs more information from Accounting. And the accounting systems that carried you to $2 million were not built for $15 million. Nothing necessarily looks broken. That is what makes this stage so deceptive. The processes that got you here may still work. Your people may still be good. Your customers may still be buying. What changed is the weight your existing structure is being asked to carry. At $2 million, you can still personally compensate for the gaps. Somewhere on the road to $5 million, $10 million, or $15 million, that stops being possible. The business did not suddenly become dysfunctional. It outgrew its dependence on informal coordination.  Part 5 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

Fixing It: How to Build the COO-Accounting Relationship Your Business Is Missing

By Alisa McCabe • October 12, 2026
If Article 3 felt a little too familiar, your first instinct may be to call a meeting. You tell Operations and Accounting they need to communicate better. That will not fix it. The five warning signs were never personality problems. They were signs that your accounting systems and routines were never intentionally built around how these two functions work together. People cannot follow a structure that does not exist. Accounting cannot inform decisions they do not know are being considered. Your COO cannot use financial information they cannot access in time. The fix is not complicated. That does not mean it happens naturally. Most of what you need to build will feel almost obvious. Recurring conversations. Clear handoffs. Shared definitions. Access to the right information. This is not glamorous work. That is probably one reason it gets overlooked. For the first few months, you may have to follow up constantly. People will forget. Meetings will get moved. Someone will make a decision and skip the handoff. Then something starts to change. The follow-up becomes unnecessary. Information moves without you. Problems get caught earlier. Eventually the results look effortless from the outside. They were not. You built the relationship that made them possible. ​ Part 4 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

Five Warning Signs Your COO and Accounting Aren’t Talking

By Alisa McCabe • September 28, 2026
Article 2 ended with a question. What would you actually see first if this relationship started breaking down inside your business? Here is the answer. You would see five things. If you are like most owners reading this, you are already looking at two or three of them. None of the five announces itself as a communication problem. Each one shows up as friction inside your accounting systems, wearing a perfectly reasonable disguise. That is the difficulty. On the surface, none of these looks like a broken relationship. Each looks like something else entirely. A busy month. A tough quarter. A personality difference between two people who were never going to be friends anyway. Every one of them gets explained away the first time you see it. That is exactly what makes them expensive. This article does not fix any of it. Article 4 does that. The job here is naming what is already sitting in front of you. Most owners walk past these signs for years without recognizing what they are looking at. ​ Part 3 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship