If you’re a CFO and you’re wondering which tools you need to take your business to the next level, then don’t worry – you’re not alone. It’s a difficult decision, but it’s also an important one. A well-assembled fintech stack can enable growth, deliver scalability and help to control costs.
Assembling a best-in-class fintech stack helps CFOs achieve career-defining goals such as:
- Protecting and increasing company profitability as the company scales
- Ensuring compliance across all financial and accounting operations
- Uncovering and mitigating hidden cost centres
- Providing a well-resourced employee experience.
What to look for when evaluating finance tools
Whether you’re just starting building out your fintech stack or you’re finetuning what you already have, the prospect of finding the right set of tools to grow your business can be a daunting one.
Thankfully, we’ve got you covered. We’re going to run through some of the best-in-class picks for your ideal fintech stack below. But first off, why not brush up on the steps you need to consider before choosing the right tools to grow your business by reading our article ‘How to build a modern finance tech stack’?
Best-in-class picks for the CFO's fintech stack
Accounting for early-stage businesses: Zoho Books
Best suited for small and medium-sized businesses, Zoho Books is a great cloud-based software that makes day-to-day accounting fast and manageable. And you can’t beat its price.
Zoho offers a suite of other products, from sales support to IT management, with which Zoho Books (unsurprisingly) integrates seamlessly with. And while larger SMBs may eventually outgrow Zoho Books and seek a more personalised approach to their fintech stack, many startups and growing companies rely on it to remove pain points from accounting tasks.
Zoho Books starts as low as €12 per month and offers a free 14-day trial.
Capterra rating: 4.4/5 stars
ERP for accelerating businesses: NetSuite (an Oracle product)
If your business is beginning to outgrow its SMB status, you’ll need to update your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software accordingly. And NetSuite could be the platform for you, offering robust financial reporting options, especially for businesses operating several legal entities.
The user interface is also highly rated, with customisable reports, dashboards and views to increase productivity and streamline standard processes.
Contact NetSuite for a product tour and price quote.
Capterra rating: 4.1/5 stars
Expense management: Pleo
Expense management is often regarded as a laborious but essential activity for every business. Pleo helps those businesses by reducing manual admin processes thanks to a complete set of automated tools.
By providing employees with smart company cards, Pleo allows organisations to keep on top of expense data and receipts with real-time visibility. Streamlined with links to in-house finance departments, it’s a huge timesaver for everyone across the business.
Reviews highlight in particular Pleo’s user experience, which has an almost-perfect score on Capterra. This is especially practical for a tool used across the organisation, and among employees outside of the finance department less experienced in expense management.
Pleo offers three different types of subscription, from its free ‘Starter’ package up to ‘Advanced’, which is €79 per month and provides a full range of services, including 1% cashback for eligible customers.
Capterra rating: 4.9/5 stars
Expense management: Spendesk 
How can a platform help businesses avoid paying company expenses with their own cards? And how can leadership retain control while providing greater access to spending company money? Spendesk offers solutions to these common challenges.
Expense management inevitably creates operational bottlenecks, but Spendesk handily breaks them down. The platform provides single-use or ongoing virtual cards for online spending and safety assurance. And for business trips, Spendesk issues physical cards to take on the road.
The platform enables CFOs to retain up-to-date expense tracking across the company, compare actual spending to budgets, assign customisable card limits and access detailed records if desired.
Three pricing tiers are available to Spendesk users, which you can learn more about by requesting a quote from their team.
Capterra rating: 4.8/5 stars
Financial planning and analysis: Pigment 
Pigment is a powerful business planning tool that’s as flexible as it is functional. Designed for FP&A and RevOps teams, it enables users to consolidate, aggregate and make dynamic models of key data, such as revenue sources. With this, users can identify trends, risks and opportunities to move their business forward.
Pigment is particularly strong when it comes to visual storytelling. Think all-hands meetings, board retreats and other venues for important presentations. You want your team equipped with the best-in-class dashboards and visualisation tools when advocating for budgets and informing stakeholders on company performance.
Reviews cite a large upfront time investment in getting to know the platform’s full capabilities — but a helpful onboarding team stewards the process from start to finish.
Pigment is still a relatively new platform and frequently releases new and exciting features. It offers three pricing tiers. You can request a quote to learn more.
G2 rating: 4.7/5 stars
Financial planning and analysis: Cube 
Cube is an ideal tool for SMBs looking to simplify financial reporting workflows. It aggregates and syncs hundreds of data sources into a polished user interface, customisable by user types and departments.
Users report that Cube allows them to spend less time creating reports and more time analysing and extracting insights. It also promises ‘endless’ integrations across data sources, such as data warehouses, query engines, transactional databases and data visualisation tools, such as business intelligence platforms, notebooks and front-end frameworks.
And, of course, you can also use Cube to create a single source of truth. From here, the platform batch exports data directly into spreadsheets for business teams that prefer creating data visualisations with Excel or Google Sheets.
The team promises fast implementation — in days, not months.
Cube is free for 1 GB of data pass-through for development and proof-of-concept projects. Standard and enterprise plans are also available. Reach out to their team to get started.
Capterra rating: 4.7/5 stars
Payroll for growing SMBs: Personio
As Europe’s leading HR software for SMBs, Personio has made a good name for itself, thanks to its feature-rich and easy-to-use platform.
Users praise Personio for its excellent customer support, which helps clients from implementation through to the day-to-day tasks of payroll management.
Personio boasts an all-in-one HR platform, from recruiting to offboarding, centralised data and seamless integrations with other software. However, some users have suggested the platform lacks a sufficiently wide range of available reports.
Personio’s pricing starts at €2.88 per month and offers prospective clients a free trial.
Capterra rating: 4.3/5 stars
Payroll and HR for larger SMBs and enterprises: Rippling
Global payroll, HR, IT, benefits and onboarding management — all in one platform? Rippling promises all these features and more in one neat package.
The Rippling HR Cloud offers benefits administration, payroll, PTO management, pulse surveys, learning management, full-service payroll and applicant tracking — all the features that enable a successful partnership between the CFO and CPO.
Starting at $8 per user per month, Rippling is an attractive option if you’re seeking a comprehensive yet price-conscious HR solution. Inquire for European pricing.
Capterra rating: 4.9/5 stars
Credit card payment processing: Stripe
Easy, fast payments are critical to growth-stage startups and SMBs alike, but they can also be a real pain.
Stripe is a leading payment processor offering core financial infrastructure for online businesses. Users do not need to create a merchant account. Instead, Stripe starts collecting credit and debit card payments immediately on your behalf.
Stripe supports payments in several major currencies and delivers robust financial reporting tools that play nicely with most FP&A and accounting platforms listed above.
Stripe’s rates are transaction-based and some of the most competitive worldwide. There are no setup or monthly fees associated with the service.
Capterra rating: 4.7/5 stars
Direct debit payment processing: GoCardless
There are many benefits to offering alternative payment methods. ACH transfers and direct debit payments are cheaper for businesses. Plus, many online shoppers prefer to spend their cash instead of using a credit card.
GoCardless is a great option for SaaS or subscription-based businesses that set up recurring customer payments. It reduces transaction costs substantially.
GoCardless automates customer payments using ACH and direct debit from checking or savings accounts. Their platform helps users to increase payment conversions, reduces the need for collections efforts and keeps payments secure along the way.
Users pay a variable fee per transaction. Custom pricing is also available.
Capterra rating: 3.9/5 stars
Supply-chain vendor management: Precoro
As inflation rises worldwide, CFOs need real-time insights into supply-chain vendor performance and costs. Precoro is a rising star in the vendor software category for its user-friendly, in-app experience and comprehensive budget, supplier and inventory management features.
Use Precoro to fulfil compliance obligations and centralise multiple countries, currencies, offices and reports into one secure database.
Precoro starts at $35 per user per month. Inquire for European pricing.
Capterra rating: 4.8/5 stars
Supply-chain vendor management: Odoo
Recognised as an established play by Capterra, Odoo is an open source software that is flexible and can be adapted to SMEs or large corporations.
Its wide range of robust features include everything, from vendor onboarding to data analysis to payment reminders.
Odoo offers free pricing tiers, including a free option as well as a personalised one for €29.90 per month.
Capterra rating: 4.2/5 stars
Cash flow management: Agicap
Perfect for SMBs, Agicap supports over 3,500 finance teams on a daily basis, with automation and data-analysis tools that allow users to track their cash flows in real time.
Proponents of Agicap say that it’s a huge timesaver, and they appreciate how it integrates easily with bank accounts and other businesses.
Agicap’s prices vary massively depending on the user organisation's specific needs. However, you can easily request a quote on their website.
Capterra rating: 4.1/5 stars
International payments and currency risk management: iBanFirst
When it comes to cross-border transactions, prohibitive fees, slow and fragmented processes, and unpredictable currency exchange rates can quickly become a finance team’s nightmare.
By taking the complexity out of currency transactions, iBanFirst keeps CFOs in the driver's seat when managing cross-border payments. With iBanFirst, you can collect, convert and send funds efficiently across 140+ countries while protecting your business from currency market volatility.
Unlike many cross-border payment providers, iBanFirst delivers complete transparency with its pricing, fees and terms. And our team of FX experts are with you every step of the way. Contact us today for more details.
Capterra rating: 4.7/5 stars
