An integrated finance tech stack is crucial to drive efficiency and help your organization thrive. However, “finance” is a big category. From financial planning & analysis to accounting to ERP solutions, a modern finance tech stack consists of many financial software solutions. With so many options in so many categories, it’s easy for companies to get confused about how to best align their tech investments to match their business goals and objectives.
In this guide, we lay out everything you need to know about financial management software tools: what they are, their benefits, different categories of financial solutions, the top players offering them, and key factors to consider while building your financial tech stack.
Table of Contents
The 5 key benefits of financial software
The best finance management software helps you take control of your financial data and workflows and makes your and your teams’ life easier. Instead of manually filling out countless Excel spreadsheets, it automates the nitty gritty details and saves you and your team time.
Here are some of the biggest benefits that SaaS companies can expect to realize with a well-constructed modern finance management software stack.
1. More efficiency and fewer errors
Automation is at the core of financial software solutions. Automated data entry, reconciliation, and reporting boost efficiency and significantly reduce the risk of errors, which are common when teams work on spreadsheets. With less time spent chasing down different teams to validate their data, CFOs and their finance teams can allocate more time to strategic planning instead of doing technical or repetitive tasks.
2. Supports on-demand reports and analytics
Software for financial management gives department leaders and managers direct access to relevant data through user-friendly dashboards and interfaces. This reduces dependency on finance teams for routine data requests, minimizing back-and-forth emails. Leaders can make data-driven decisions swiftly, promoting agility in day-to-day operations.
3. Better transparency into business finances
A modern financial software stack involves integrating different systems and creating a centralized data repository which acts as a single source of truth for everyone in the organization. When CFOs and finance teams can access unified, real-time data, they have better visibility into all aspects of the company's financial performance and can make better, informed decisions.
4. Easier collaboration in context
Modern finance management software provides a shared platform for data access and insights with integrated communication channels to help different teams collaborate with the same context. Whether it's budget planning, forecasting, reconciliation or performance analysis, teams across the organization can work with a shared understanding for more informed and cohesive decision-making.
5. Higher cost efficiency
As businesses grow, continuing to use spreadsheets as a panacea for the full spectrum of finance use cases affects growth due to large hidden costs. Investing in the right finance software tools, though it involves an upfront cost, provides ROI quickly to recover the initial investment by helping finance professionals be more agile, strategic and data-driven.
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Building the right financial tech stack
Business finance is tough to manage and gets even more challenging as you start scaling. As your startup grows, no single tool covers all your financial processes.
If you’re like most companies, you probably started out working with spreadsheets combined with a few different tools to meet your most basic needs. Before long, as your needs become more complex, your tech stack begins to grow as you start adding additional financial software systems to it.
The key here is to make sure they all play nice together. A well-integrated tech stack with high interoperability can not only streamline data, workflows and collaboration but can also significantly improve your bottom line. It helps companies have greater controls, compliance, and visibility.
The 12 different categories of financial software
When considering a financial solution, the term "financial software" is an umbrella concept for a large range of financial solutions. While there are a lot of categories you could look at, we have handpicked the 16 most important ones that every company needs to consider at some point in their growth journey to manage and optimize its financial performance.
Selecting the best software in each category can be a pretty daunting task. There are a lot of vendors in each category, and their suitability for your business may vary based on the size of your company, the type of product and specific features they offer, as well as other factors.
It can take a lot of time to narrow all that down. We developed this guide to help you do that faster by diving deep into each category to identify top picks that excel in their respective domains.
| Finance Software Category | Description | Our Top Picks |
|---|---|---|
FP&A software (aka Strategic Finance Software) | Streamlines budgeting, forecasting, and financial performance analysis to enable strategic decision-making | Drivetrain |
| Core accounting software (or ERP) | Tracks financial transactions and helps manage the operational aspects of business finances | NetSuite (Enterprise) Xero & QuickBooks (SMB) |
| Billing / invoicing software | Automates and streamlines tasks like creating and sending invoices, tracking payments, and managing customer billing | Chargebee |
| Business intelligence (BI) & analytics tools | Simplifies data analysis by providing tools for visualizing and exploring business performance | Looker |
| Revenue recognition software | Streamlines revenue management to allocate, reconcile, monitor, and recognize revenue while staying compliant | Maxio |
| Cap table management software | Maintains and updates a company's ownership structure like share issuance, options granted, transfers, and equity transactions | Carta (MM/Enterprise) EquityList (SMBs) |
| Close management software | Supports general bookkeeping for monthly close and provides reconciliation, reporting, and workflow management tools | Floqast (MM/Ent) Numeric (SMBs) |
| Corporate credit card & expense management software | Tracks all the transactions made through corporate cards to help identify spending patterns and trends for better management | Ramp |
| SaaS procurement software (spend management software) | Provides visibility into SaaS subscriptions and their utilization to help control SaaS costs | Spendflo |
| Sales tax compliance software | Tracks state and local sales and use taxes to support reporting and audits for better tax compliance | Avalara Anrok |
| Accounts payable (AP) automation software | Connects businesses with their customers digitally to and streamline invoicing and payment | BILL (formerly known as Bill.com) |
| Data warehouse | A data management system that aggregates data from multiple sources into a single location to support querying and analysis for business intelligence activities such as analytics | Snowflake |
Other essential non-core finance software and tools
CRM, HRIS and sales compensation software are crucial tools of the overall finance tech stack. They help with customer and employee information
| Finance Software Category | Description | Our Top Picks |
|---|---|---|
| Incentive & commission management software | Automates calculating, tracking, and managing incentives, commissions, and bonuses for teams | Spiff |
| Customer relationship management (CRM) | Consolidates customer information into a single CRM database to track all communications and nurture relationships | Hubspot (SMB/MM) Salesforce (Enterprise) |
| Human resources information system (HRIS) | Collects, manages, stores, and processes an organization's employee information | Rippling |
Key considerations when choosing financial software tools to build into your tech stack
Selecting the right enterprise financial management software for your organization requires a strategic approach. Your financial software should of course automate tedious manual processes, but they can do so much more depending on your needs.
We’ll assume at this point that you already have a good understanding of what your current needs are and that you’ve anticipated what your needs will be as you scale your business.
Next, you’ll conduct a detailed assessment of the finance automation tools in each category that makes sense for your business, considering their features, scalability, and integration capabilities. You’ll also want to compare cost, implementation time, and expected ROI for all the solutions.
Here are some key criteria to consider before selecting financial software in any of the categories above.
1. Integrations & interoperability between tools
Your chosen financial software should be able to communicate and share data with other systems effortlessly. It needs to seamlessly integrate with other business applications such as accounting systems, CRM, and ERP software. When data flows freely, and different tools complement each other, your team can focus on strategic tasks and decision-making.
2. Scalability
Financial software does a lot of number crunching, often with data stored in multiple and databases distributed across business functions. Given this, your finance tool should not only be compatible with your current systems but also be flexible enough to provide seamless integration with any additional systems you might need to adopt as you scale your business. It should also offer easy expansion of storage and processing capabilities and to handle increasing volumes of data and transactions efficiently.
3. Communication and collaboration
While tracking and managing the financial performance of a company are typically the domain of CFOs and their finance teams, their work involves collaboration with different teams and departments within the organization. The financial tools you choose should support collaboration with financial dashboard software to facilitate regular updates and streamlined communication features such as in-app commenting or Slack notifications. These features help ensure everyone is on the same page and can understand the context of each decision.
4. Compelling, data-rich visualizations
More than 80% of finance pros, including CFOs, believe data storytelling is an essential skill. The best finance management software provides the tools to tell those stories, with versatile, built-in data visualization features and customizable reporting formats that allow you to look at your data in different dimensions and create engaging reports.
5. Easy to set up, learn, and use
To help teams get on board sooner, your ideal financial software must have an appealing user interface and the dashboards it provides should be easy to navigate. Look for solutions with good support and which require minimal IT intervention and systems integrators (SIs) as these typically increase costs and implementation times. Less reliance on tech teams and ready support to address user challenges and other features that make your financial software easy to use will not only accelerate time to value but also increase the ROI on your investment.
6. Implementation, customer support and success
Every financial software needs regular upkeep and fixes to remain practical and functional. Reliable support and maintenance ensure smooth operations. This includes timely updates, bug fixes, and technical support to resolve any issues.
7. Robust security and compliance features
The consequences of a data breach can be enormous given the many different data protection laws in effect today. When evaluating software for financial management, it’s always a good idea to choose one that follows industry best practices for data encryption, authentication, and authorization and has consistently kept information safe and secure.
Top tools for each category of financial software
If you’re considering setting up a reliable and efficient financial management system for your startup or in the process of leveling up your current tech stack, take a look through the tools listed below.
We’ve identified and profiled several finance software companies across all 16 categories of advanced financial management to assist you in creating the ideal modern finance tech stack for your business.
FP&A Software
FP&A solutions form the backbone of business success. Drivetrain is a leading contender in the latest generation of strategic finance software and is designed specifically for growing B2B and SaaS businesses.
Drivetrain offers the full range of FP&A features, including multi-dimensional scenario planning, budgeting and forecasting, financial close management, headcount planning, financial automation and consolidation, and business performance measurement, on-demand reporting, and more.
With 200+ integrations, Drivetrain integrates easily with your current (or future) finance stack to provide a quicker time to value. It also takes a programmatic approach to data imports and can ingest data from any system or application in any format without limitations.
Drivetrain's modeling architecture is designed to be both intuitive and powerful. You can model at the speed and dimensionality that matches the needs of your business, thanks to plain English formulas, Excel functions, and a shallow learning curve. This combination of powerful computing and end-user control is how Drivetrain helps to improve financial planning and analysis at all levels of your business.
Accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software
Here, we describe three different vendors for financial management accounting software that you might want to evaluate depending on the stage of business growth you’re in.
NetSuite is a cloud-based business accounting solution designed for large enterprises. It offers project accounting capabilities and simplifies the process of managing payables and receivables, collecting taxes, and closing the books.
Next on our list of top financial software companies offering an ERP solution is QuickBooks—a simple and flexible accounting software popular among SMBs in the North America market. You can manage accounting and tax data, create and send invoices, determine tax liabilities and generate return reports instantly from multiple devices. But, as a company becomes more complex operationally (multiple subsidiaries, multiple currencies, etc.) they typically look to upgrade to NetSuite, Sage Intacct, or Microsoft Dynamics.
Xero is another cloud-based accounting and P&L software for SMBs. Quite popular among accounting professionals in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region, it automates bookkeeping and accounting with third-party add-on software integrations extending its functionality. The platform includes a chart of accounts, general ledger, bank account reconciliation, cash flow management, bill capture and receipts, purchase orders, invoicing, accounts receivable and payable, and business management.
Billing and invoicing software
Chargebee, which serves SMBs, is particularly well-suited to SaaS as an effective cloud-based billing and subscription management software. You can create well-designed invoices, automate the billing process and manage late payments. It integrates with popular payment platforms such as Paypal, Square and more to facilitate direct payments, improve productivity by reducing manual data entry, and increase overall efficiency.
Business intelligence (BI) and analytics software
Looker is a popular business intelligence software ideal for SMBs. It helps companies explore, visualize, analyze, and share business analytics easily. It has comprehensive data sorting and analysis features and embedded analytics to help you analyze data in real time. One of the key features of Looker is that it is a no-code software, making it easy to use for all teams.
Revenue recognition software
Another crucial component of finance management system software is revenue recognition. Maxio is a financial management software designed for B2B SaaS companies to automate complex revenue recognition scenarios per GAAP/IFRS standards. It not only streamlines revenue and expense recognition but also billing, subscription management, tracking SaaS metrics, and analytics.
Expense management software
Airbase is a popular expense management platform alongside Expensify and Ramp that helps mid-market companies streamline and manage spend approvals and expense reporting.
Cap table management
Optimizing valuations is a critical process for all companies and cap table management software helps in managing the equity, and in some cases, the valuation mechanism itself. Carta offers an easy-to-use interface for equity management and is the market leader in this space. It provides a comprehensive range of features that are ideal for startups at any stage to manage their equity requirements.
EquityList cap table management software is geared towards startups in India, Singapore, US, MENA, and other regions. The platform helps companies manage cap tables, stock options (ESOP, SAR, RSU, etc), data rooms, board management, and related compliances.
Corporate credit card and spend management software
Ramp combines a corporate card offering with expense management, bill payments, vendor management, and accounting automation. It goes beyond a traditional business credit card and provides direct integrations with top business tools. The ability to set spend limits with custom-defined approval workflows to pay vendors and reimburse employees in an user-friendly interface sets it apart from the rest.
Close management software
FloQast is a close management software that can significantly streamline your process of reviewing and reconciling financial statements at the end of each accounting period and provides high-confidence reporting and approval processes. Ideal for mid-market and enterprise companies, FloQast offers robust integrations with other tools for financial management or accounting software to close books faster.
Numeric is a close management solution that’s ideal for startups. It’s one of the best financial tools for empowering accounting teams because it prioritizes speed, precision, and control to expedite the closing process while enhancing collaboration, visibility, and control across various departments.
SaaS procurement software
Spendflo helps businesses negotiate, buy, renew, and manage their SaaS tools. With the average department in an organization using about 87 SaaS applications, vendor spends is one of the biggest expense items. Spendflo automates and optimizes the process of requesting, onboarding, and managing SaaS tools. Spendflo works with you to fully understand your requirements and leverages pricing benchmarks to ensure you get the best deal possible on your SaaS investments, and streamlines the procurement process.
Sales tax automation software
Companies need to stay compliant in order to reduce the risk of errors and penalties. To do that, many turn to Avalara, a cloud-based tax compliance software designed to help businesses navigate the complex landscape of domestic and cross-border taxes, handle the various reporting requirements, and prepare tax filings.
Anrok tax compliance software provides end-to-end sales tax automation for SaaS businesses. It syncs with your billing, payment, and HR systems and calculates tax in real-time. Not only does it automate monitoring and calculation, but it also takes care of registration, filing, and payment for you.
Accounts payable (AP) automation software
Perfect for small teams with basic needs, BILL (formerly known as Bill.com) simplifies and enhances the entire accounts payable process—from invoice receipt to payment. BILL is a top finance software company that provides a centralized dashboard where businesses can manage their accounts payable and accounts receivable. It offers great visibility and control over your end-to-end financial management processes.
Data warehouse
Like all the rest of the data your company collects on a day-to-day basis, managing and storing financial data so that it’s easily accessible for finance operations, including planning, modeling, forecasting, and reporting. Snowflake is a popular, cloud-based data warehouse that provides a centralized platform for data storage, and secure sharing and consumption of data in real time.
Snowflake offers a range of features including the separation of storage and compute, on-demand scalable compute, data sharing and cloning, and third-party tool support, which can address the demanding requirements of growing businesses.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software
Investing in a CRM is one of the most important things a business can do to build and maintain a healthy pipeline. Marrying your CRM and ERP data is a key requirement for sales capacity planning, computing compound metrics such as LTV:CAC ratio, CAC payback period, Burn Multiple, etc.
A pioneer in the CRM category, Salesforce is a powerful CRM, especially suited for large enterprise teams. It provides a wide array of tools for automating workflows and tracking analytics. Additionally, specific plans include an AI assistant that automatically handles tasks such as lead scoring, calculating deal health, and other functions.
Hubspot is the de-facto CRM software for early-stage and mid-market companies alike looking for common CRM features like contact management and workflow automation. Many companies prefer Hubspot as it provides marketing automation and help desk features which means they don't have to switch between multiple tools to manage all the activities necessary to nurture prospects through the pipeline and serve them well once they become customers.
Human resources information system (HRIS) software
HRIS is a crucial part of the finance software stack as it houses all the crucial employee data, which is typically one of the largest expense line items to manage. Integrating your HRIS with your CRM and ERP systems is essential to do headcount planning and related analysis.
Rippling is a HRIS tool that caters to SMBs, helping them manage HR, finance, and IT processes under a unified platform. You can manage and automate every aspect of the employee lifecycle. This includes unifying all the workforce systems, such as payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. With Rippling, you get a comprehensive solution to manage their workforce and streamline administrative tasks.
Other popular HRIS solutions tools include Gusto and BambooHR.
Incentive and commission management software
Spiff stands out as a great tool offering a fresh approach to incentive and commission management that automates commission calculations. It integrates directly with popular CRMs and ERPs to pull in the data required in real-time to calculate commissions.
How Drivetrain speeds up financial management
Within the broad landscape of technology to support business finance, strategic FP&A solutions provide the backbone that supports all the financial functions your business needs to succeed.
Drivetrain is a robust, proven solution in this category purpose-built for growing B2b and SaaS businesses with the full range of FP&A features they need and seamless integrations with more than 200 different tools covering all the software categories we’ve discussed here.
LambdaTest is just one example of how companies are using Drivetrain to accelerate growth through better and more strategic financial management.
LambdaTest needed a finance management tool that offered better visibility into its sales pipelines and streamlined data analysis for informed decision-making. With Drivetrain, LambdaTest was able to integrate all the systems needed to achieve this, significantly reducing the time required for data analysis from 4-5 hours to just 15 minutes. Gaining the ability to spend more time on analysis helped LambdaTest become even more competitive through data-driven decision-making.
As a robust and advanced financial management software, Drivetrain also helped LambdaTest create and track its annual plan, saving the finance team even more time. The platform's support played a crucial role in adapting to LambdaTest's evolving needs, offering new features and customized dashboards for different teams within the company. Drivetrain made data understandable, allowing various teams, including sales leadership and product teams, to gain insights quickly and make informed decisions.
“Just 30 minutes on Drivetrain will give me an answer.”
— LambdaTest
Key outcomes included faster intelligence in tracking actuals against the annual plan, more time for high-value initiatives, and eliminating hidden opportunity costs.
The CFO credited Drivetrain’s financial software with providing accurate intel to teams, enabling a focus on long-term initiatives and leveraging data-driven insights for competitive advantages in the SaaS market.
“The way [the data] shows up on Drivetrain is clean. A person can drill down into everything… Unlike a BI tool, Drivetrain offers a package solution – one that does the job, end to end.”
Drivetrain's ability to consolidate data from various software tools into a single accessible platform benefits the finance team and different data owners, making FP&A easier and simplifying many aspects of the financial close process.
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FAQ
Which software is best for finance?
There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to choosing financial management software. Different tools for financial management are ideal for different use cases. For instance, Drivetrain is the best CFO software for financial planning and analysis, while Spendflo is best for SaaS procurement.
What is the full form of FMS and ERP?
FMS is the acronym for financial management system, and ERP stands for Enterprise Resource. Planning. An FMS performs various functions like tracking financial transactions and assets and forecasting future revenue streams based on current trends. ERP supports automation and processes in finance, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain, services, procurement, and more.
Is Excel a finance software?
Excel is used extensively in finance functions, but it is not financial system software. It is designed to support personal finance and budgeting but falls short when dealing with extensive data for organizations.
Related financial management software guides
We have even more information on financial management related software and tools. Check them out.
