A billing and finance stack for early startups
You're a pre-seed or seed founder who just took real money (revenue or a check), and your 'finance system' is a personal Venmo, a Stripe dashboard you never open, and a shoebox of receipts. Tax season is coming and you have no idea what your runway is.
Wired & tested by Sameer + Ankit
Free · the verdict
You do not need a CFO, a $400/mo finance suite, or a managed bookkeeper that can disappear overnight. You need one free bank, Stripe to get paid, free corporate cards that track their own spend, and one cheap accounting tool the others sync into by themselves. The wild part: most of this stack glues itself with native integrations, so the only thing you actually build is a runway alert. Four core logins, runs on autopilot, and the books close before your accountant asks.
The stack
Mercury
Stripe
Ramp
Xero (or QuickBooks Online)
Make
Google Sheets
- MercuryThe money's home base. Free business banking built for startups: checking, savings, a charge card, and a real API. This is where revenue lands and where everything else connects back to.
$ Free. $0/mo, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, free domestic and international USD wires, free ACH. Paid Plus (~$35/mo) and Pro (~$350/mo) tiers exist for bigger teams, but a seed startup runs free for years. Verify current terms before you commit.
- StripeHow you get paid. One integration covers card payments, recurring subscriptions (Billing), one-off invoices (Invoicing), and sales tax (Tax). The revenue engine the whole stack reads from.
$ No monthly fee. 2.9% + $0.30 per online card charge. Add-ons are usage-based: Billing is 0.7% of subscription volume, Invoicing is 0.4% per paid invoice, Tax is 0.5% per transaction where you're registered. You only pay when money moves.
- RampThe money going out. Free corporate cards for you and the team, plus expense tracking, receipt capture, and bill pay (AP). Every swipe categorizes itself and syncs to your books with no data entry.
$ Free. $0/mo on the base plan: unlimited physical and virtual cards, expense management, receipt matching, and bill pay (ACH, card, check, wire) included. Paid Plus is ~$15/user/mo for advanced controls. Qualification needs roughly $25k in a business bank account.
- Xero (or QuickBooks Online)The books. The GAAP layer your CPA actually wants: ledger, reconciliation, financial statements, tax-ready reports. Mercury, Stripe, and Ramp all push into it natively, so it fills itself.
$ Xero Starter is ~$20/mo. QuickBooks Online Simple Start is ~$38/mo after Intuit's mid-2025 price hike. Pick one. Both run intro promos (first month free, or up to 80% off for 3 months on Xero), so the first quarter is close to nothing.
- MakeThe glue, but barely. The native syncs handle the boring plumbing, so Make only does the smart stuff: a Slack ping when runway dips, when a big invoice is overdue, or when an unusual charge hits. The alerts a CFO would catch.
$ Free plan with 1,000 ops/mo, enough for a few finance alerts. Paid Core starts around $10.59/mo for 10,000 ops, roughly 3-5x cheaper than Zapier at the same volume. For a finance stack you likely never leave the free tier.
- Google SheetsYour one-screen money dashboard. Pull MRR, cash balance, and burn into a single tab so 'what's our runway?' is a glance, not a fire drill. Free with the Workspace you already pay for.
$ Included with Google Workspace (~$6/user/mo for Business Starter), which most founders already have for email. The dashboard itself costs nothing on top.
🔌 The wiring
- 1
Open Mercury first and make it home base. All revenue from Stripe pays out here, and Ramp pulls from here. This one account is the spine the rest of the stack hangs off, so set it up before anything else.
- 2
Wire Stripe to collect every dollar: card payments for one-off sales, Billing for subscriptions, Invoicing for the manual stuff you email. Set Stripe's payout account to your Mercury checking so money you earn lands in the bank automatically, daily.
- 3
Roll out Ramp cards to yourself and the team, then kill every personal card you've been expensing on. Each swipe captures its own receipt (via SMS, email, or Slack) and gets categorized, so spend tracks itself instead of becoming a month-end archaeology dig.
- 4
Pick Xero or QuickBooks, then turn on the native connections. Mercury pushes bank transactions with AI-suggested GL codes, Ramp syncs card spend and bills, Stripe feeds revenue. The books reconcile themselves daily, which is the entire point: nobody copy-pastes a transaction, ever.
- 5
Now build the one thing worth building. A Make scenario reads your Mercury balance and Stripe burn, then pings Slack when runway drops below a number you pick (say, 6 months). That single alert is the difference between 'we have a quarter left' and finding out the week before payroll.
- 6
Add a second Make alert for the unsexy leaks: an invoice 14+ days overdue, or a card charge above a threshold you didn't expect. These are the things a finance hire would catch on a Friday review, automated for the price of nothing.
- 7
Last, drop a Google Sheet over the top: MRR, cash on hand, and monthly burn in one tab, refreshed from Stripe and Mercury. When an investor asks for your numbers, you screenshot a tab instead of spending a Saturday in spreadsheets.
✂ What to cut
Cut the all-in-one finance 'platform' an accelerator pushed on you: the $200-400/mo suite that bundles banking, cards, and bookkeeping behind one logo. You're paying a premium to avoid wiring four tools that wire themselves for free. Cut the managed bookkeeping service too, and not just for the price. Bench, the largest small-business bookkeeper in North America, shut down overnight on December 27, 2024 and locked 35,000 customers out of their own financials weeks before tax season. When you rent your books, you don't own them. Stripe, Mercury, and Ramp keep your data; your accounting tool keeps your ledger; you stay in control. Also cut the standalone expense app (Ramp does it free), the separate AP/bill-pay tool (Ramp again), the dedicated subscription-billing SaaS at pre-seed scale (Stripe Billing's 0.7% is cheaper than a seat until you're much bigger), and any Zapier plan doing finance syncs that the native integrations already do for $0. The rule: if a tool's pitch is 'we connect your bank to your books,' your bank and your books already connect. Don't pay for the bridge that ships in the box.
The receipts
What it costs
$20-40/mo flat to start. Banking, cards, and expense are free; accounting is $20 (Xero) to $38 (QBO); Make's finance alerts run on the free tier. Add Stripe's usage fees only when you're actually getting paid (2.9% + $0.30 a charge). An all-in-one finance suite runs $200-500+/mo for the same outcome.
Time to wire
an afternoon
What it replaces
A $200-400/mo bundled finance platform (banking + cards + books behind one login), a managed bookkeeping subscription ($200-500/mo and counting, plus the risk it vanishes), a standalone expense tool ($10-15/seat), a separate bill-pay/AP product, a dedicated subscription-billing SaaS, and a Zapier plan doing the syncs the native integrations already handle.
Where it breaks
It breaks at the seams between tools when an API or sync hiccups, which is a 10-minute reconnect a couple times a year, not a crisis. It also asks one honest thing of you: actually look at the dashboard. The runway alert only saves you if you don't mute the Slack channel. And the day you raise a real round or pass a few million in revenue, you'll outgrow the DIY books and want a fractional controller, at which point this same stack feeds them clean data instead of a shoebox. It scales with you; it just stops being free first.
Members · the full blueprint
The wiring, the configs, the templates, the Loom.
The full blueprint hands you the build, not the homework: the importable Make scenarios (the runway-below-X Slack alert wired to Mercury + Stripe, the overdue-invoice nudge, the anomalous-charge flag), a chart-of-accounts starter mapped to the Stripe, Mercury, and Ramp categories so your first sync isn't garbage, the live Google Sheets runway dashboard with the MRR and burn formulas already in, a month-end close checklist you can run in 20 minutes, and a 12-minute Loom from empty bank account to fully-wired books. Copy, connect, done before your accountant emails you.
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How Sameer + Ankit wired it
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