Expense management software helps businesses automate and streamline the process of tracking, managing, and reporting expenses – in a single platform. It brings visibility into the company’s expenses to understand spending patterns and reduce errors in managing them.
The main problem with the manual expense management process is the involvement of data entry tasks across adding bills, applying for reimbursements, settling claims, etc. Even small errors can mess with your expense tracking and efforts to control budgets. Moreover, it doesn’t give visibility into expense management, making it difficult to find errors to fix.
An expense management software controls expenses by avoiding manual errors using automation. You also identify opportunities to save costs as finance teams focus on strategic decision-making for cost savings rather than administrative tasks.
Geekflare has researched the best expense management software that enables you to gain visibility into business expenses for better financial decisions.
- Zoho Expense – Best for Small Businesses
- Rippling – All-in-one HR, IT Payroll and Expense Management
- Precoro – Best for Small to Medium Businesses
- Moss – Best for Financial Transparency and Control
- Pleo – Best for European Companies
- Emburse – Best for Mobile Expense Management
- Payhawk – Best to Optimize Company Budgets
- BILL – Best for Real-Time Expense Tracking
- Expensify – Offers Corporate Card with Cash Back
- SAP Concur – Best for Large Enterprises
- Veryfi – AI-powered Receipt Data Extraction
- Everlance – Best for Self-Employed Expense Tracking
- Rydoo – Best for AI-Powered Expense Monitoring
- Fyle – Best for Intelligent Expense Reporting
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Zoho Expense
Best for Small Businesses
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- Integration35+
About Zoho Expense
Zoho Expense is part of Zoho’s Finance product suite, which focuses on travel and expense management for businesses. It provides dedicated expense management tools for handling online and offline travel workflows in a single platform.
Zoho provides a cost-effective solution to consolidate business expenses across trips, purchase requests, reimbursements, and more. With its powerful reporting, integrations, and collaboration features, finance teams can make informed decisions about their expense management.
Zoho Expense Features
Multi-Currency Support: Ideal for businesses operating in different countries.
Establish expense rules: Set regular limits on per diem or expense amounts for employees to control expenses. You can notify them as they reach their expense limit.
Mobile Accessibility: Allows expense tracking on the go via a mobile app.
Customize and control: Implement custom roles and approvals workflows and design custom dashboards based on employee access hierarchy or expense category.
Card management: Centralize and reconcile personal and corporate credit card management in real-time.
Zoho Expense Pros/Cons
Generous free trial provides key features to test expense management automation
Good accuracy of auto-scan feature for uploading bills and receipts
Option to add travel expenses based on per diem or mileage
Inadequate expense reporting features
Issues syncing the mobile app with updates done on the web app
Initial setup is time-consuming
Inadequate integration to streamline payroll and reimbursement payments
Zoho Expense Pricing
| Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up To 3 Users, 5 GB Receipt Storage, 20 Receipt Autoscans |
| Standard | $4 | 20 Receipt Autoscans per user, Corporate Card Reconciliation, Cash advances |
| Premium | $7 | Receipt Autoscan, Travel Requests, Purchase Request, Advanced Approval |
| Custom | Pricing on request | Dedicated account manager, Around-the-clock priority global support, Personalised implementation, onboarding and training, Custom ERP Integrations |
Rippling
All-in-one HR, IT Payroll and Expense Management
- Travel Expense ManagementNo
- Integration600+
About Rippling
Rippling helps you control your business expenses by automating the reviewing and blocking out-of-policy expenses. It focuses on helping you implement your expense policy using approval chain workflows, trigger actions to notify policy limits, issue payments, and more.
With Rippling, you can integrate payroll and reimbursement to simplify employee management. It integrates with its HR and accounting software ecosystem, further helping with auditing and compliance in a single platform.
Rippling Features
Custom policies: Implement tailored rules and restrictions on what each employee can see and adapt as employee role changes.
Automated approval chains: Implement approval workflows to review expenses with role-based rules.
Multi-currency support: Reimburse expenses across 100+ countries while your dashboard reads the currency of your choice, helping global companies operate effectively.
Cross-currency reconciliation: Automatically convert expenses into the reviewer’s currency, streamlining the reconciliation process for foreign transactions.
Report builder: Generate real-time expense reports and answer reimbursement queries directly within the payroll system.
Rippling Pros/Cons
Unified platform for implementing custom expense policy
Robust features focus on self-servicing
Integrated platform with HR, analytics, payroll, LMS, help desk, surveys, and more
Can purchase apps separately as per business requirement
Too many features increase the learning curve and set up time
Users report inadequate international payment options
Email-first support leads to a lack of human assistance and an increase in resolution time
Difficult user navigation
Precoro
Best for Small to Medium Businesses
- Travel Expense ManagementNo
- IntegrationNetSuite, Xero, QuickBooks, Amazon, Slack, Power BI
About Precoro
Precoro provides visibility and predictability into your employee expenses. It is one of the best apps for business expenses to track, manage, and automate expense management workflows via the dashboard.
Procure’s features target budgeting efficiency in procurement and employee management to help your business make informed financial decisions. It adjusts as per your industry use cases, company size, and purchase model, thus providing flexibility in your finance and budgeting strategy.
Precoro Features
Unify purchases: Easy to add and edit employee expenses with approval workflows to process all transactions in a single platform.
Customize workflows: Create custom fields, approval workflows, and dashboard designs based on user roles and permissions.
Supplier management: Centralizes supplier information, making managing contracts and maintaining vendor relationships easier.
SSO and Google login: It enables secure login access. You can also limit IP addresses, helping manage multi-location employee posting.
OCR technology: Autoscan receipts and digitize paperwork to avoid manual data entry.
Precoro Pros/Cons
User-friendly dashboard for non-finance teams
Organized design and easy to use
Cost-effective pricing for small business expense tracking
Ideal for procurement workflows
Streamlines procurement activities in one platform for better visibility.
Inadequate invoicing and reporting features
Lacks dedicated travel booking and expense management features
No bulk import feature for adding purchase orders
Precoro Pricing
| Plan | Pricing (monthly) | Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Core | $499 | Advanced procurement, 3-way matching, Automated approvals, Custom fields and workflows, Real-time budget tracking |
| Automation | $999 | AP automation, Dynamic intake forms, Vendor onboarding, Supplier Portal, Selected ERP integrations |
| Suite | Pricing on request | Multiple entities, Regional server selection, Advanced admin controls and security, Custom implementation, IP white-listing |
Moss
Best for Financial Transparency and Control
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- Integration50+ including Accounting, Xero, NetSuite and HRIS
About Moss
Moss’s expense management software focuses on accounting and bookkeeping functions. You can sync your accounting system by supporting it with data from receipts, expense tracking, and budgeting efforts.
It allows you to issue credit cards with custom limits and approval policies tailored to employee roles. This digitizes data for easy month-end closing calculations, thus improving the productivity of finance teams.
With Moss, you can issue employee cards and control the spending, manage the expenses, automate invoice payments, and create custom workflow. Moss is suitable for UK and European companies.
Moss Features
Corporate credit cards: Issue employee cards with customizable limits to maintain spending oversight.
Manage receipts: Use Moss’s mobile app to capture data from offline receipts. Also allows automatic sync using direct integration with Gmail/Outlook.
Payout options: Allows bundling employee expenses and reimbursements with multiple payout options like Apple Pay.
Month-end closing automation: Integrates with accounting software and automatically categorizes corporate credit card spending data.
Enhanced security measures: Moss’s platform is GDPR-compliant and uses multi-layer defenses like multifactor authentication, contactless payments, Single-Sign-On (SSO), and more.
Moss Pros/Cons
Easy to add receipts and success ratio of recognition with mobile app
Responsive customer support
Good for accounting and finance teams’ productivity
Data sync features make accounting easy
Budget control features
Single platform pricing, irrespective of the number of users
Involves learning curve
Inadequate expense reporting features
Takes time to set up with credit card allocation, dashboard design, adding team members, and more.
Inadequate forecasting features
Pleo
Best for European Companies
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- IntegrationAccounting, NetSuite, HRIS
About Pleo
Pleo is the best expense management software for European companies, and it centralizes digital payments, invoices, expense tracking, and reimbursements into a single platform. This makes accounting easy, including for multi-entity expenses, thus making finance teams more productive.
With spending controls and insights, the business can strategize to ensure it meets budgets as decided. A unique feature includes subscription management, where it can remove duplicates and handle recurring payments.
Pleo Features
Real-time expense tracking: Helps get real-time insights on expenses for making informed decisions to avoid overspending.
Pleo company cards: Use physical, temporary, or virtual cards that allow employees to make purchases directly. Finance teams can maintain control by setting spending limits.
Multi-entity expense management: Manage expenses across different entities or offices from a single account.
Automate receipt management: Captures and syncs every expense data across subscriptions, invoices, offline spending, or daily expenses with your accounting tool.
Streamline out-of-pocket expenses: Helps track expenses as per defined company policy with approval workflows and spend alerts.
Pleo Pros/Cons
Provides real-time auditing and bookkeeping features
Effective receipt management features
Simple setup with an intuitive user interface
Provides 1% cashback for every expense on the purchase of annual plans
Integration of virtual card expenses and accounting software reduces manual work
Pleo positions itself as a ‘spend management platform’, making it unsuitable for enterprises
Inadequate tax management features
Limited acceptance of virtual cards
Users report unreliable fetching of receipts from emails
Pleo Pricing
| Plan | Pricing (monthly) | Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Essential | £39 | 3 users included, Real-time expense tracking, Automated expense reports, Accounting system integrations |
| Advanced | £89 | Multi-entity management, Advanced controls, Phone support |
| Beyond | £179 | 5 users included, Spending insights, Assisted onboarding, Concierge support |
Emburse
Best for Mobile Expense Management
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- IntegrationNetSuite, Sage, QuickBooks, Xero, Salesforce
About Emburse
Emburse provides a mobile app to help manage expenses and reimbursements on the go. Using its ‘ adaptable expense policy ‘ feature, you can tailor its expense management software to your industry.
Its travel expense management features make it ideal for organizations with frequent employee travel requirements. It also provides physical and virtual cards that make controlling employee spending more seamless and integrated.
Emburse Features
Optimize travel expenses: Leverage useful features like tracking and rebooking lower fares to save travel costs.
ERP integration: Seamlessly digitize with expense management software and increase its functionality by integrating with existing accounting, invoicing, HR, and other systems.
Virtual cards: Get a physical or virtual corporate card that allows you to easily control expenses using spending limits.
Mobile receipt capture: Employees can submit expenses as they happen using the intuitive mobile app, enabling real-time receipt capture for accurate reimbursements.
Dashboards: Make informed decisions by creating custom expense reports and tracking vital metrics using dashboards.
Emburse Pros/Cons
User-friendly desktop and mobile app
Adequate resources to learn Emburse’s expense management tools
Ideal for companies looking to add/edit travel expenses on the go with a mobile app
Active customer support that considers feedback
Features in desktop and mobile apps are not in sync
Inadequate reimbursement workflows
Difficult to navigate reporting features
No bulk import option
You need to upload receipts one by one, making it still a manual process
Payhawk
Best to Optimize Company Budgets
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- Integration50+
About Payhawk
Payhawk offers to streamline your financial budget and efforts to control it with its expense management software. By creating budget management per cost center, you can track business expenses made under it in real-time.
Further, you can automate subscription management and restrict spending by adding limits as per expense policy. With Payhawk, the finance team can also create personalized expense reports across cost centers, teams, employees, or expense categories, which help with audits.
Payhawk Features
Individual and team cards: Issue debit or credit cards with strict spending limits to control expenses and digitize transactions for easy accounting and reconciliation.
Real-time expense tracking: Get a dashboard with live expense monitoring that centralizes all transactions.
ESG reporting support: Payhawk automatically tracks carbon emissions to back up your ESG reporting and sustainability efforts.
Subscription management: Track and handle recurring payments. You get insights into expenses such that it gets predictable, thus helping with better financial decisions.
Custom approval chains: Implement custom spend policies by designing approval workflows and spend limits across transaction categories.
Payhawk Pros/Cons
Features track expenses to enable better budget control and optimization
Active product and customer support team
Multi-currency support
Documentation features reduce paperwork
Provides cashback on expenses
Inadequate data export options
Users report slow software, delays in updating data, and occasional glitches.
Complex integrations setup
Allows uploading only one receipt per transaction
Note: For businesses registered in EEA or UK/I with less than 50 employees, can test Payhawk for 24 months at £149/month.
BILL
Best for Real-Time Expense Tracking
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- IntegrationQuickBooks, Sage Intacct, Oracle Netsuite, Slack, HRIS, Xero
About BILL
BILL offers free expense management tools that centralize streamlining transactions across company credit cards, reimbursements, and tracking expenses. It also provides dedicated features to handle travel booking and expense tracking using the BILL Divvy Corporate Card.
BILL helps with real-time expense tracking, such that you can forward this data to its Account Payables or Account Receivables software for further accounting. It integrates with multiple third-party software, thus helping you make informed decisions with additional functionalities.
BILL Features
Mobile app for receipt tracking: Complete and track transactions on the go using BILL’s mobile app to update expenses.
Virtual cards: The BILL Divvy Corporate Card helps save from any exposure to fraud and controls expenses with spending limits.
Expense policy: Use budgeting and expense management control features to implement your company’s expense and reimbursement policy.
Accounting software integrations: Sync and share data with ERP and accounting software like NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, and more.
Handle reimbursements: Bring all out-of-pocket expenses together and reimburse employees or vendors on time with ACH payments or payroll system.
BILL Pros/Cons
Being free enables small business expense tracking
Saves money and time for big monthly expenses with petty cash transactions
Fraud prevention features on virtual cards
Offers a rewards program on expenses done using a virtual card
Doesn’t track personal expenses
Bugs in the accuracy of uploading receipts
Lacks notification feature to alert about budget constraints
Cannot set limits on receipts
Does not support multi-entity expense management
Inadequate budgeting and expense hierarchy
Expensify
Offers Corporate Card with Cash Back
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- Integration45+
About Expensify
Expensify provides an expense management platform for both individuals and businesses. You can track receipts, prepare expense reports, automate invoices, and manage travel workflows in a single platform.
With budget-friendly pricing and a free expense management tool for individuals, it is good to get started. It also offers cashback on their corporate credit card expenses – thus, further helping you reduce investment into expense management software.
Expensify Features
Collaboration tools: Centralize communication with employees, vendors, customers, etc via chat, emails, or messages.
Global reimbursements: Supports payments across 190+ countries in their local currencies.
Travel management: Streamlines booking accommodations and travel via flights. Allows adding spending limits on travel bookings and flexible payment options.
40+ integrations: Enhance functionality and avoid data migration by integrating directly with ERP and accounting software like Xero, Quickbooks, NetSuite, Workday, Sage Intacct, and more.
Virtual cards: Issue corporate cards to handle employee expenses for easy accounting and budget control.
Expensify Pros/Cons
Directly fetches expenses from credit cards, emails, and receipts
Less yet effective features make it easy to use
Good reporting capabilities
Includes personal expense tracking features
Provides a dedicated email address to send receipts directly to the app
Difficult setup and navigation
Small business users report poor and limited customer service
Mobile apps have limited features compared to desktop
Users report occasional bugs and glitches
Per-user pricing plans make it expensive for large teams
Expensify Pricing
| Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Collect | $5 | Allows unlimited SmartScans, access to Expensify cards, ACH reimbursement, integrations, and more. |
| Control | $9 | Allows everything in Collect + SAML/SSO authentication, budgeting, reporting, and approval workflows. |
SAP Concur
Best for Large Enterprises
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- Integration700+
About SAP Concur
SAP Concur comes with an integrated platform and enterprise features that enable large organizations to streamline expenses across their complex operations. It automates the collection, centralization, and processing of expense data from existing systems and channels like receipts.
With deep integration with 50+ ERP solutions, you get actionable insights to make informed financial decisions for your enterprise.
SAP Concur Features
Policy compliance checks: Automates approval workflows and establishes checks using alerts to maintain company expense policy.
SAP Concur mobile app: Streamlines employee expenses by guiding them during business trips and capturing receipt data for easy accounting and reimbursements.
Real-time spend analytics: Provides dashboards that offer insights into spending trends to make effective financial decisions.
Concur travel: Centralizes complete travel expense management by prepopulating business trip information into expense claims. This automates and quickens the pace of employee reimbursements.
700+ integrations: Sync and share data with existing software for a smoother transition and enhanced capabilities.
SAP Concur Pros/Cons
SAP branding and experience with enterprise customers
Effective mobile app for uploading receipts
Advanced AI and OCR for capturing expense data
Powerful integrations enable scalability
Adequate SAP Concur expense management software training resources
Inadequate auditing features to enforce expense policy
Users report poor post-purchase customer support
Limited mobile app features compared to desktop
Users report a steep learning curve for SAP Concur
Veryfi
AI-powered Receipt Data Extraction
- Travel Expense ManagementNo
- IntegrationQuickBooks, Xero, Dropbox, Google Drive
About Veryfi
Veryfi’s AI expense management platform integrates advanced OCR technology to capture effective expense data from receipts and documents. It is suitable for self-employed individuals or businesses dealing with many offline transactions involving paperwork, receipts, invoices, cash collection, etc.
The Veryfi mobile app further streamlines expense management by syncing captured data with its bookkeeping platform or sharing it with third-party integrations. Your business can also generate expense reports to gain insights for optimizing expense management.
Veryfi Features
Self-serve billing portal: A dedicated space for accountants to manage multiple clients efficiently by simplifying billing and project tracking.
Real-time expense reconciliation: Accurately and automatically reconcile transactions against uploaded receipts by connecting bank accounts or credit cards.
Reports for financial decisions: Generate standard or customized reports to gain insights into spending patterns.
OCR technology: Experience AI for extracting expense data from receipts, invoices, forms, documents, etc.
Integration with accounting software: Sync expenses directly with QuickBooks or Xero to update them in real-time for seamless bookkeeping.
Veryfi Pros/Cons
Good customer support
Effective and accurate OCR recognition technology
Easy to use and quick setup
Seamless bookkeeping workflows
Google Drive and Dropbox integration help backup files
Inadequate import export option
Expensive for small business expense tracking requirement
Veryfi Pricing
| Veryfi Plan | Pricing (monthly) | Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Allows processing up to 100 docs/month with limited storage and email support. |
| Pay as you go | $500+ | Allows processing up to 10k docs/month with limited storage and email support. |
| Custom | Pricing on request | Get volume discounts on processing invoices, receipts, and other documents with unlimited storage. |
Everlance
Best for Self-Employed Expense Tracking
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- Integration70+
About Everlance
Everlance streamlines personal expenses for self-employed professionals like freelancers or individuals. It simply syncs your bank account and credit cards to track all transactions and organize them for further processing.
You can track expenses and determine potential tax deductions and insights on savings. The expense management tools are user-friendly and effective, making it an ideal choice for anyone looking to streamline their expense management process.
Everlance Features
Upload receipt: Users can easily upload photos of receipts to cloud storage to keep their records organized and accessible at any time.
Get insights on expenses: Helps organize and separate personal and business expenses for self-employed professionals, making it easy to analyze spending habits on the dashboard.
Mileage tracking: Provides effective tools like favorite location detection, trip categorization, visual maps for routing, and more for mileage tracking.
Tax deduction finder: Suggests potential tax deductions based on recorded expenses, helping users save money during tax season.
Tax deduction finder: Sync, scan, and review credit card and bank account transactions for potential tax deductions. It also automatically generates IRS reports for tax filing.
Everlance Pros/Cons
Separates personal and business expenses
Effective for mileage tracking and reimbursement workflow automation
Adequate features for self-employed professionals who travel a lot
Easy to use with no steep learning curve
Allows data export
Suitable for small businesses due to low-pricing plans
Users report glitches in recording trips and expenses
Users report buggy automatic sync and tracking
No bulk editing option for transactions or trips
Lacks customization for reporting and dashboards
Everlance Pricing
| Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Free (Business) | $0 | Allows up to 15 users to automatically track 30 trips per month with limited expense management features. |
| CPM Program | $10 | Allows unlimited trip detection and direct integration to sync bank account and credit card transactions. |
| FAVR Program | $33 | Everything is in Premium + additional training and priority support. |
Rydoo
Best for AI-Powered Expense Monitoring
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- Integration35+
About Rydoo
Rydoo uses AI to optimize the expense management process, enabling finance teams to track expenses, conduct smart audits, and gain insights to make better financial decisions. It also enables smart travel expense management with mileage tracking and per diem management features.
With Rydoo, your employees can submit expenses quickly and accurately by simply snapping a picture of their receipts. Further, its advanced AI-enabled features, like fraud detection and expense compliance management, help streamline and scale expense policy implementation efforts.
Rydoo Features
Rydoo mobile app: Track employee expenses by scanning receipts, automating mileage tracking, and simplifying per Diem calculations.
Set up approval workflows: Track and enforce expense policy by streamlining expense approvals and follow-ups.
Global compliance: Supports tax, per diem, and mileage calculations in 80+ countries.
Credit card reconciliation: Automate adding expenses from credit cards and banks, and AI helps match and clean data.
Integrations: Sync and share data between your existing systems across 35+ HR, travel, ERP, or accounting software to centralize expense management.
Rydoo Pros/Cons
Good accuracy of OCR for uploading receipts
The cloud-based platform makes it easy to generate reports and audit trails
Clean and intuitive navigation
The mobile app doesn’t recognize receipt pictures clicked in low light
User-based pricing can get expensive for large teams
Users report poor customer service and occasional glitches and lags when using the software
Rydoo Pricing
| Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $9 | Allows access to the mobile app to add unlimited expenses with basic integration and single approval workflow. |
| Pro | $11 | Automated reconciliations, custom policy enforcement, multi-level approval workflows, and more. |
| Enterprise | Pricing on request | Insights dashboard, sandbox access, and advanced automation. |
Fyle
Best for Intelligent Expense Reporting
- Travel Expense ManagementYes
- Integration5+
About Fyle
Fyle helps SMBs manage employee expenses and automate accounting workflows. It provides a ‘messaging’ interface to log expenses, where you can share receipt pictures. Fyle’s OCR detects expense data to save.
Fyle provides automation and integration with accounting software to use this expense data for streamlined accounting. This eliminates manual data entry and enhances visibility into spending patterns, thus saving time and reducing errors.
Fyle Features
Texting for receipt collection: Your employees can text receipt photos, and Fyle captures spending data to save. It can then follow up for more information over the text, helping avoid the need to manually edit information on the desktop app.
Automate expense reports: Fyle’s AI generates expense reports on schedule or demand by simply texting.
Alerts and notifications: Help employees update receipts and information when they use their credit card. This ensures timely budgeting, accounting, and reimbursements.
Manage trip expenses: Offers dedicated tools to track mileage and per diem, streamline travel booking, and sync data with accounting software.
Automate expense compliance: Fyle’s AI flags expenses that do not adhere to your company’s spending policies, thus avoiding manual reviews.
Fyle Pros/Cons
Proactive customer support
Allows sending expense reports from the mobile app
Detects handwritten documents
Can fetch expense data from emails
Intuitive mobile app user interface
Inadequate options to set up approval workflows
Lacks integrations with other apps like travel or taxi booking platforms
Users report occasional app glitches and wrong detection of data by AI
Inadequate dashboard features for reporting and analytics
Fyle Pricing
| Plan | Pricing (monthly) | Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | $11.99 | Allows unlimited AI receipt scans and tracking with credit card and bank account integrations, reconciliation, and single-stage approvals. |
| Business | $14.99 | Multi-entity compliance enforcement, advanced analytics, API integration, and premium support. |
| Enterprise | Pricing on request | Advanced security features and a dedicated enterprise account manager |
What is an Expense Management Software?
Expense management software provides visibility into your business and employee expenses across operations. It tracks expenses, aggregates transactions, and integrates them with accounting software to streamline expense tracking to maintain clean financials.
For this, expense management software often uses AI technologies like OCR for offline receipts and modern expense cards, such as corporate and virtual cards, to capture expenses. This automates the error-prone efforts required to manually enter transaction details and check compliance with policies.
Thus, with accurate expense data, financial teams can easily generate expense reports to make financial decisions and optimize business expenditures.
What are the Benefits of Using Expense Management Software?
An expense management software translates the gained visibility into expenses into the below benefits:
Save Time
The best business expense tracking apps allow users to use mobile apps to capture receipts data using OCR technology.
Without this simple automation, your employees and financial teams have to perform manual tasks:
- Uploading receipts
- Maintaining paperwork for invoices or receipts
- Data entry of expenses in the required company format
- Clean data to remove duplicates
- Review expenses for policy compliance
- Follow-up with employees or vendors for re-checking expenses
- Match transaction data with banks and credit cards
- Remove or edit expense data to accommodate changes
- Sending data to generate reports
- Sharing data with other accounting software
With just one expense automation workflow, your business effectively removes these 10 manual tasks!
Enforce Compliance
An expense management software with built-in policy enforcement features ensures that all expenses adhere to company guidelines and regulatory requirements. The software automatically flags non-compliant submissions and helps follow up with flagged expenses to investigate issues more deeply. This reduces the risk of fraud or unauthorized spending.
Another way business tracking apps ensure compliance is by restricting spending by adding spend limits or rules on assigned credit cards. It also notifies employees when they reach expense limits so that they are mindful of their ongoing expenditures.
Increase Business Visibility
Expense management software provides real-time visibility into spending patterns across business operations. Finance teams can access dashboards that display current expenses, trends, and budget utilization.
With this visibility, they can make informed financial decisions.
For example, finance teams can quickly identify that travel expenses have surged in a particular department. With this insight, they can investigate further and implement measures to curb unnecessary travel costs.
Optimize budgets
Cloud-based software to track expenses helps save, categorize, and organize data in real-time. One can use AI or data analytics tools on this historical data to determine trends and ways to reduce expenses. Based on these insights, finance teams can set budget limits for different categories and receive alerts when approaching those limits.
For example, a company may find that its marketing department consistently overspends on events. With this insight, they can adjust future budgets or implement stricter approval processes for event-related expenses.
What is the Difference Between Expense Management and Spend Management Software?
Spend Management Software and Expense Management Software help automate and streamline business expenditures. The key difference lies in which area of finances they focus on, which we will understand using this table:
| Criteria | Expense Management Software | Spend Management Software |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Focuses on tracking and monitoring of employees expenses. | Focuses on individual projects and their spending. |
| Primary features | Tracking expenses, settling claims, managing bills, expense reporting, travel booking, mileage tracking, tax calculations, and more. | Managing supplier contracts, budgeting, procurement optimization, vendor management, financial projections, and more. |
| Use case example | Purchase of stationery or travel expenses of employees on official work. | Focuses on expenses from the company’s point of view. |
| Spending type | Day-to-day operational costs | Capital expenditures, operational budgets, or indirect procurement costs – all related to project management. |
| Users involved | Typically used by employees, HR, and finance teams. | Comparing quotes from vendors and determining impact on project costs or tracking project costs versus actual spending. |
| Policy tracked | Enforces expense policies for employee submissions of receipts. | Enforces procurement policies and supplier contracts to ensure compliance. Includes on-ground project execution rules and associated costs. |
| Kind of reports prepared | Generates reports focused on employee expenses, travel expenses, and metrics to track reimbursements. | Provides detailed reports on overall spending trends, supplier performance, and budget adherence. |
Best Practices for Managing Corporate Expenses
Even if you procure the best Expense Management Software, you must know how to implement it effectively to maximize corporate expense savings and return on investment:
Set a Clear Expense Policy
The first requirement is to draft an expense policy by considering minimum and average expenses for the task. Do include cases where expenses might offshoot. Then, optimize your spending limits in this range based on real expense values.
Based on these values, your policy should outline:
- What constitutes an approvable expense
- Reimbursement limits
- Required documentation for expense submissions
Make sure employees and other stakeholders are aware of the expense policy. Explore setting up alerts in the expense management software when spending limits are approaching.
Encourage Mobile App Adoption
Choose expense management software with a mobile app to facilitate receipt collection and submission. This helps employees quickly add receipts as they happen. The mobile app’s AI extracts required data instantly and submits or shares it with accounting software for further processing.
A mobile app increases the pace at which finance teams receive expense data for making on-time financial decisions.
For this, training sessions should be conducted with employees to highlight the ease of submitting expenses directly from their smartphones. These benefits include faster processing times and reimbursements.
Enforce Timely Submissions
Sometimes, employees lack the discipline to submit expenses on time. Even if they manage to submit them before the end of the month, it’s a lot of work for finance teams to review and process approvals.
In addition, such late submissions negate the benefit of gaining visibility into employee expenses. Finance teams cannot make informed decisions in real-time about controlling budgets and maintaining cash flow.
For this, set up automated notifications within your expense management software that remind employees of upcoming submission deadlines. For example, if reports are due on the 5th of each month, send reminders a week before to ensure compliance.
Conduct Regular Expense Reviews and Audits
Expense management software accurately captures expense data across operations, quickening the pace of expenditure reviews to identify anomalies and prevent fraudulent claims.
Explore expense management software like Zoho Expense, Pleo, and Rydoo, which provide dedicated expense auditing features. For other software, you can use analytics features to generate reports on spending trends.
Set Spending Limits
The best way to control expense budgets is to implement spend limits and alert workflow as follows:
- Define spending limits for different categories within assigned virtual cards or other payment modes.
- Set up automated alerts that notify managers when an employee’s expenses approach these predefined limits. Allow for follow-ups in the software to include exceptions.
- Conduct training for employees to adhere to these limits and ensure they understand these exceptions.
- Review and adjust these spending limits to accommodate changing markets and SOPs.
Such a proactive approach allows for timely interventions if spending exceeds budgetary constraints.
Offer Corporate Cards
Adopting expense management software that offers corporate debit or credit cards helps employees make purchases directly without needing to front costs. This is crucial because sometimes employees may feel uncomfortable bearing costs or may not have the required finances when performing a task. It also helps track and sync expense data in real-time.
With corporate cards, you simplify the reimbursement process as they are easier to monitor than individual reimbursements.
Explore expense management software like Moss, Pleo, Emburse, Payhawk, BILL, Expensify, and Rydoo, which provide dedicated corporate credit or virtual cards as a part of their ecosystem.