If you’re a business owner between $100K and $2M in annual revenue, getting your tech stack right is one of the smartest moves you can make. The best tech stack for small business growth isn’t bloated: it’s lean, connected and ready to scale with you. At Astero Group, this is a major part of what we do because if it’s not done right, we can’t do as good of a job helping our clients grow.
At this stage, you’re likely still wearing a lot of hats. Systems are stitched together. Information lives in too many places. (i.e. – Google Sheets) The sooner you get a clean foundation, the smoother everything runs from bookkeeping to bill pay to payroll.
This post walks through the must-have financial and ops tools for scaling businesses. Call it your CFO starter pack. After years of research and hundreds of hours of product demos, these are the tools we’ve landed on and that we use with our actual clients. (And when you cross $2M, reach out to Astero Group. We’ll take it from there.)
Bookkeeping Tools for Small Business
As a business owner, you should be focused on growth, not bookkeeping. And clean books are more than just a way to file taxes. They’re your business’s scoreboard. Without up-to-date financials, you can’t confidently make decisions about hiring, spending, or growth. Bookkeeping software (and more importantly, a great bookkeeper) gives you timely profit-and-loss insights, keeps your balance sheet clean, and ensures you don’t miss things like unpaid invoices or subscription creep. It’s also the foundation for financial forecasting, loan applications, and investor conversations. Bad books = expensive mistakes.
Decimal is our go-to bookkeeping partner. Want an intro? Email us at hello(at)asterogroup.com. Or feel free to reach out to them directly on their website.
Other good options: Bench, Pilot.
Smart Bill Pay and Expense Tracking Tools
You’d be surprised how many businesses lose money just by mismanaging payments. Whether it’s overpaying vendors, duplicating expenses, or missing due dates, it adds up fast. A good system doesn’t just automate bill pay, it adds approval workflows, audit trails, and real-time visibility into where your money’s going. For expense reimbursements, you avoid the Wild West of receipts and sticky notes, and instead have a centralized, trackable system that’s scalable as your team grows. From a tech standpoint, it connects with your accounting system so everything stays synced automatically.
Ramp makes it easy to handle company cards, employee reimbursements, and bill pay… all from one dashboard. It also gives you real-time expense insights.
Other platforms to consider: Brex, Airbase.
Best Payroll & HR Software for Growing Teams
Paying people isn’t just about direct deposits. You’re also handling tax filings, compliance with labor laws, onboarding, PTO tracking, and sometimes even benefits enrollment. The right payroll and HR software saves you from headaches, fines, and awkward conversations. It also makes your business look more professional to new hires, especially as you grow past five employees. The best systems automates tax filings and helps you stay compliant in every state where you have employees. Bonus: modern HR tools usually include built-in document storage and digital signatures for all your hiring paperwork.
Running payroll the right way is non-negotiable. Gusto handles full-service payroll, benefits, onboarding, and HR compliance all in a founder-friendly format.
Other players: Justworks, Rippling.
Complete Sales Tax Handling for Your Businesses
If you’re selling across state lines, or even just in a few cities with different tax rules, you’ve probably stepped into a web of “economic nexus” rules. Sales tax isn’t just about collecting. It’s about knowing when, where, and how much you’re required to collect and remit. Getting this wrong can lead to penalties, audits, or worse. The newer tools automate the entire process so you’re not spending hours on state websites or dealing with multi-jurisdiction spreadsheets. It’s one of those things that feels optional—until it isn’t.
Zamp simplifies it. They monitor, calculate, and file everything for you. To get introduced to Zamp, email us at hello(at)asterogroup.com or check them out online.
Accounting Software That Plays Nice With Others
Think of accounting software as the central nervous system of your back office. Everything flows through it—revenue, expenses, payroll, reimbursements, tax payments. A strong platform ensures everything is categorized, tracked, and reconcilable. It’s not just for bookkeepers. It’s also where your reports live, your bank accounts sync, and your accountant gets everything they need at year-end. And as your business adds tools like Ramp or Gusto, QBO serves as the source of truth that everything integrates into. Without a good accounting system, everything else breaks down or becomes manually painful.
QuickBooks Online is the standard for a reason. It connects to nearly every other tool you’ll need. While Xero is a solid alternative, QBO is still the better bet for U.S.-based businesses.
Bonus Tool: Voice-to-Text That Actually Works
Wispr Flow is my favorite new AI app. This isn’t a financial tool, but it helps founders stay productive. If your brain moves faster than your fingers, typing out ideas, meeting notes, or email drafts can be a bottleneck. Wispr Flow lets you speak your thoughts and automatically turn them into text, which means you’re less likely to lose ideas and more likely to move quickly. For founders, speed and clarity are everything and this gives you both.It runs in the background and lets you talk out emails, meeting notes, anything hands-free with a single keystroke. If you’re like me and think faster than you type, it’s a huge time-saver. Get a free trial here.
Final Word
Most business owners wait too long to set up their tech stack. Fixing a mess later is expensive and distracting. Setting up the right systems now gives you leverage to grow.
You don’t need an enterprise setup. You just need tools that scale with you. Nail the stack. Then, when you hit $2M, we’ll be here to take your financial strategy to the next level.
Also, while a couple of these might include a referral link, that has zero influence on why we recommend it and you won’t ever pay any more because of it. In fact, usually there’s a bonus for you that we worked out as part of the partnership. Wooohooooo!
And of course, if there’s anything you think we forgot, please reach out.