Best practices for deployment and configuration of Macs in a small business?

Hi there. We are a growing small business making extensive use of Mac/Apple devices for our business.

To date, we have purchased Macbooks at retail stores and followed a low-tech checklist to download apps, create and configure accounts and passwords, upgrade to latest versions, and other tedious tasks of new hire onboarding. We have about 12 employees and this approach has not scaled very well.

Additionally, once onboarded, we don't have a great way to manage or control the company inventory or force updates, other than whatever built-in compliance tools are available for the platforms we use (Office 365, Dropbox, Slack, OSX, etc.). I've noticed there are iOS services available (I believe, given the larger enterprise usecase there), but there aren't many for Mac OS (or both).

Any suggestions on services or small business administration tools or services in a Mac environment would be very helpful. Thank you.