How to Operate Finances for a Fully Remote Company: Tools, Strategy, and Scalable Infrastructure

CFOcloser
May 4
4 min read

Updated: May 6

Fully remote teams are no longer the exception—they're the foundation of modern tech startups and SaaS companies. But with global talent comes global complexity, especially in finance. If you're a U.S.-based company scaling with international contractors or remote U.S. employees, you need a lean, reliable, and compliant financial stack.

At CFO Closer, we've supported remote-first startups across stages—from building foundational infrastructure to managing global payroll for 200+ people in Asia, LatAm, Africa, and the U.S. This guide breaks down how to structure your operations by function—Finance, People Ops, Sales & GTM, and Ops & Enablement—so you scale with control, cost-efficiency, and compliance.

💰 Finance: Global Payments, Accounting & SaaS Billing (Remote finance operations)

Global Contractor Payments (Outbound)

Your first challenge? Paying teams across borders, cost-effectively.

Wise – Our top pick for international contractor payments. Low FX fees, wide coverage.
PayPal – Works nearly everywhere, but expensive. Use only when alternatives fail.
Payoneer – Unreliable in some regions (e.g., Pakistan).
Revolut Business – Great for EU-based businesses.

💡 Crypto payouts via platforms like Deel are available without compliance risk—but we don’t recommend this complexity early on.

Receiving Customer Payments (Inbound)

Stripe – A must for SaaS. Built-in metrics like MRR, churn, cohorts, smart retries for passive churn, and Radar for fraud detection. It’s powerful, but premium. (A dedicated article coming soon.)

Accounting & Expense Management

QuickBooks – $99/month gets you a powerful tool for invoicing, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, and multi-entity setups.
NetSuite – Upgrade when complexity (multi-entity consolidations, audit trails) requires.
SpendHound – Free cost-tracking by team. Upload vendor contracts and compare pricing benchmarks. (Feature post coming soon!)

👥 People Ops: Hiring, Time Tracking, HR & Payroll Infrastructure

Hiring & Workforce Structure

Hiring globally? Here’s how to get started:

LinkedIn – Leverage your network first for early hires.
Upwork – Best for short-term or project-based freelance work.
Canditech – For high-volume technical hiring. Thousands of prebuilt assessments for engineering, analytics, and more.

Time Tracking & Productivity

Hubstaff – Best-in-class for hourly contractor tracking. Productivity scoring and fraud detection.
Rippling – Includes basic free time tracking, but lacks productivity oversight and fraud prevention. More suited for W2 workflows.

We'll dive deeper into time tracking tools in future posts, especially if you're running a distributed engineering team or offshore CX.

Payroll & HR Infrastructure (U.S. and Global)

Hiring remote U.S. employees means navigating state-by-state tax rules. Each state = new tax registration = serious overhead.

Gusto – Ideal for early-stage teams hiring U.S. employees (<20 headcount). Simple W2 payroll, benefits, compliance.
Deel – Our top recommendation if your strategy is contractor-first and globally distributed. Handles contractor and EOR/PEO employment.
Rippling – Better suited for U.S.-heavy remote teams. Deep IT + HR automation with scalable infrastructure.

💡 What’s a PEO? A Professional Employer Organization co-employs your team, handling taxes, benefits, and compliance. Perfect for fast-scaling U.S. teams.

Global Workforce Strategy

Contractor-first hiring = 50–70% savings with the right talent strategy.

Best hiring regions:

India – Great for tech, data, analytics.
LatAm – Ideal for bilingual sales, SDRs, CX.
Eastern Europe – Strong engineering talent.

⚠️ Contractors = no benefits, no taxes, no long-term commitment—but if you don’t reward them fairly, attrition rises. Balance is key.

🛠️ Ops & Enablement: Async Comms, Project Management & Automation

Async Communication & Collaboration

Avoid 3AM meetings. Use async tools to stay aligned across time zones.

Loom – Record video updates, training, demos.
Snapify – A budget-friendly, open-source Loom alternative.
Slack – Industry standard for team comms, but costs can balloon ($10K+ per year, more with AI). Integrates with ClickUp, Kixie, Google, and more.

Productivity & Project Management

ClickUp – Robust task management. Ideal post-20 headcount. Now includes an AI note-taker that creates meeting transcripts and auto-generates action items inside ClickUp.
Notion – Great for documentation, wikis, and internal SOPs.
Asana – Structured project management. Good UI but pricy.

Use these tools once you’re scaling past 50–100 people. Before that, optimize for cost and ease.

Internal Automations

Zapier – Link tools without code. Example: send new Stripe customers to Slack.
Kixie – Sales automation via calls/SMS. Tight Slack + CRM integrations.

🚀 Sales, Marketing & Partnerships: CRM, Customer Support & GTM Tools

CRM: Grow As You Go

GoHighLevel (GHL) – Affordable CRM to get started. Functional but clunky.
HubSpot – Ideal for mid-stage growth. Great for inbound marketing + sales.
Salesforce – Enterprise-grade. Use once processes are mature and GTM motion is established.

Customer Support & Ticketing

Intercom – Startup-friendly with support automation. Good for early teams.
Zendesk – Best for scale. Preferred tool at CFO Closer when budget allows.

🔁 Suggested Departmental Tool Stack by Stage

Stage	Finance	People Ops	Ops & Enablement	Sales & GTM
1–5 FTE	Wise, QuickBooks, Stripe	Google Sheets, LinkedIn, Gusto (U.S. Based), Upwork	Notion, Slack (free), Zapier	GHL, Intercom (startup plan)
5–20 FTE	Stripe, SpendHound	Gusto (U.S. Based), Upwork	Snapify	HubSpot (starter)
20–100	Stripe Radar, SpendHound	Canditech	Slack (paid), Kixie, Notion (paid)	HubSpot (Pro), Intercom (scale)
100–200	NetSuite, Stripe (Sigma)	Deel/Rippling (PEO), Gusto, Linkedin (paid)	ClickUp AI, Custom dashboards	Zendesk, HubSpot (Enterprise)
200–300+	ERP, NetSuite	Global PEO/EOR (Deel, Rippling)	AI productivity layers	Salesforce, Custom RevOps

Final Thoughts

Remote operations are more efficient when powered by the right stack. From payments and payroll to automation and async workflows, every system must integrate smoothly across departments.

At CFO Closer, we build and scale financial infrastructure for remote-first tech companies looking to grow without adding overhead. This is your roadmap to building a remote finance operation with global teams with control, speed, and cost-effectiveness.

Need help identifying the best stack for your business? Let’s connect.