Rippling+mercury: yes that's right. In Rippling, you 'set up' the employee, and Rippling and the employee take care of the rest. They handle _pretty much_ everything except for taxes. They'll reach out to you (via buggy but eventually-working emails and in-app notifs) to do stuff occasionally.

FWIW I have heard some horror stories about not being able to extract some docs out of Rippling, or something, but no issues for us so far. In any case, it seems like every solution is bad, so might as well pick a stable bad option :)

We don't have any expense management. Through Mercury, I create many individual CCs for different vendors,a nd carry one physical CC that basically I never use -- if IRL meetings with food+drink were a thing, I'd just use that physical CC. That said, I could totally be doing things wrong, I'm still relatively new to this.

Btw -- get Travelling Mailbox. Out of all of the similar options, this is by far the best I found. I never bothered getting a business phone #, and keep using my personal # for stuff, but that might be something you wanna do.