A Computer Engineering curriculum is much better than a traditional CS degree for this type of work, so you might look at what texts are being used in high quality CE programs. The Embedded Systems Conferences from UBM are also a good source of training for low level firmware implementation.

The developer that uses the right tool for the job will be more productive.

That means using a language with static type checking and a productive debug environment. Learning a new system infrastructure takes time, but only finding out about easily preventable failures during testing instead of compile time costs more.

... April 1st was almost two weeks ago.

I have to agree here. You say you are a small company, in my experience requirements for even modest size projects are generally easy to manage with human language documents, just label everything for traceability. If a word processor is too awkward switch to a spreadsheet, or use them in combo. But I do highly recommend using a defect tracking database. I like Jira.

My bank is similar when it comes to CSV/QIF/OFX files, only 90 days of history. But they have years of online statements in pdf format. Recently I got behind on my imports, and found that pdftotext and a little perl was all I needed to create .qifs from the pdf statements. .csv should be easier.