Spend management software helps you optimize every expense you disburse from source to pay to stay within the stipulated budget and pay vendors according to the contract. It automates tracking, organization, and optimization of spending across operations so that you can save and re-invest in business growth.
The post-COVID markets still haven’t gained stability. Today, one observes an increase in inflation and unstable oil prices due to wars. The rising cost of raw materials directly impacts procurement costs for projects. Hence, businesses may implement workarounds to procure resources to maintain profits, take a hit in margins, or increase their selling prices. These measures contribute to an overall increase in prices in the market.
Such tricky market scenarios create a vicious cycle of rising expenses, leaving businesses with no choice but to control their operational costs and eliminate unnecessary expenditures.
That’s where adopting spend management software helps—it provides real-time visibility into these expenses, allowing managers to find alternatives or remove unnecessary costs to fit budgets and procurement contracts.
Geekflare has tested the best spend management software based on its features, pricing, pros, cons, and use cases.
- Pleo – Best for Employee Spending Management
- Moss – Best for Financial Transparency and Control
- Payhawk – Best for Global Spend Management
- Airbase – Best for Procure-to-pay Software
- Rippling – Best for Automated Policy Controls
- Precoro – Best for Full Expense Control
- Spendesk – Best for Real-Time Spend Visibility
- Coupa – AI-driven Business Spend Management
- Mesh Payments – Best for Real-Time Reporting
- Ramp – Best for Corporate Card Management
- Brex – AI-powered Expense Review Management
- Certify – Best for Small Businesses
- Bill.com [Formerly Divvy] – Best for Accounts Payable Automation
- SAP Concur – Best for Global Enterprise
- Workday – All-in-One Finance, IT and HR Management
- Tipalti – Best for Automated Payment Processing
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Pleo
Best for Employee Spending Management
- Multi-currency SupportNo
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationAccounting, NetSuite, HRIS
About Pleo
Pleo helps centralize all employee expenses, invoices, and reimbursements in a single spend management solution. You can pay, manage, and optimize expenses using its smart corporate cards, automated account payable solutions, and spend management tools. This includes managing multi-entity transactions as well – you get holistic visibility into complete employee expenses at the organizational level.
Pleo’s focus on European markets makes it a suitable choice for businesses operating or targeting this market to simplify accounting and banking workflows. It is also ideal for companies wanting to track employee expenses that involve lots of petty cash, receipt management, or approval flows to control them.
Pleo Features
Smart Company Cards: Powered by Mastercard, Pleo offers physical, virtual, and temporary corporate credit cards for safe and flexible business expenses, vendor payments, and petty cash.
Accounts payable: Avoid data entry to perform bookkeeping, manage invoices, and track accounts payable. Includes approval workflows and payment solutions. It also includes reconciliation features and integrations with leading accounting software like Sage50, QuickBooks, Xero, and more.
Spend controls: Use multi-step approval workflows and custom spend limits to track and control spending across multi-entity organizations.
Automation: Design automation workflows to chase receipts, invoices, and report generation to analyze employee spending.
Recurring payments: Handle subscriptions seamlessly on autopilot and catch any duplicates or remove unused services.
Pleo Pros/Cons
User-friendly mobile app and website for both user and admin profiles
Provides both physical and virtual corporate credit cards
OCR technology to scan receipts and invoices
Responsive and effective customer support
Offers good integration options across accounting, communication, HRIS, procurement software, etc.
Users report glitches like invoice document uploading errors, misaligned tags, transaction failures, etc.
Features focus on employee spending use cases rather than complete spend management
Pleo focuses on the European market
Pleo Pricing
Pleo Plan | Price (monthly) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Essential | $39 | Cards, Real-time expense tracking, Automated expense reports, Accounting system integrations, Recurring vendor management, Flexible card limits, Automated review flows |
Advanced | $89 | Multi-entity management, Advanced controls, Advanced user roles and permissions, HRIS integrations, Phone support |
Beyond | $179 | Spending insights, Assisted onboarding, Concierge support, Customer success manager |
Moss
Best for Financial Transparency and Control
- Multi-currency SupportNo
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationsERP, SSO, HRIS
About Moss
Moss is a spend management platform with procurement and accounting tools for complete spend tracking, assessment, and control. It uses corporate cards to decide spending limits and track transactions for easier and faster month-end closing accounting. Its integrated procurement process solutions further help automate purchase requests, invoice approvals, and budget tracking to save on spending and simplify audits.
Moss provides dedicated ERP integrations, and its pricing is not based on the number of users. This makes it a good option for enterprises or organizations with large teams looking to control their finances.
Moss Features
Accounts payable: Automate manual tasks to save time on tasks like data entry, data extraction, bulk payments to vendors, recurring payments, and invoice follow-ups.
Corporate cards: Get use-case-specific cards to handle subscriptions, one-time transactions, or projects. Place approval workflows and spending limits to control the budget and track expenses in real-time.
Purchase requests: Streamline the procurement process by designing spend policies, creating custom purchase requests, automating invoice generation, and using budget alerts when spending doesn’t adhere to imposed compliance.
Integrations: Moss provides 2-way integrations with major HR, ERP, SSO, and accounting tools like Oracle, QuickBooks, Workday, Deel, Azure, TravelPerk, and others.
Automated accounting tools: Moss uses AI to place captured data into the right accounting fields. It also alerts about empty fields and missing information, flags unauthorized transactions, analyzes business expenses for cost-cutting, and more.
Moss Pros/Cons
Single platform pricing – No user-based pricing makes it cost-effective for organizations with high headcounts
Responsive customer support
User-friendly and modern interface design
Seamless corporate credit card management with unlimited physical and virtual cards
Does not support multi-entity visibility
Inadequate receipt management features – users report Moss does not automatically capture receipts from emails; there are occasional issues in data extraction from receipts.
Payhawk
Best for Global Spend Management
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationERP, Accounting, HR, SSO
About Payhawk
Payhawk supports multilingual data extraction for multi-entity companies with a global presence. This means it can process invoices and receipts in 60+ languages, saving you time translating them manually. Additionally, it provides a ‘One Global Card Program’ to consolidate and centralize card management across currencies, countries, and entities, further streamlining global operations.
Payhawk offers ERP integrations, unlimited users, and customizable spending policies for effective budget control. This makes it ideal for multi-entity companies with large teams looking for exhaustive finance management features. It provides a unified platform for tracking spending across departments and global branches, enhancing visibility and control.
Payhawk Features
AI-enabled accounting software: Uses AI algorithms to simplify accounting, including bank reconciliations, receipt data entry, match fields, expense codes, and more.
Analyze spend data: Understand spending patterns across global entities, current funds vs. upcoming spending to make strategic decisions, or track workflow status on ‘Group’ levels in a centralized spend dashboard.
Security: Includes provisions to comply with local regulatory laws and is SOC1, PCI DSS, and SOC2 compliant with 24/7 monitoring for added security.
Global payments: Issue cards and create dedicated IBANs worldwide, covering Europe, the US, and the UK. It also offers single-click, cost-effective transfers to over 160 countries in 50+ currencies.
Cost savings: Provides cashback on corporate card spending, makes VAT reclaim processing more efficient with receipt management, and aggregates multiple spend management tools into a single platform.
Payhawk Pros/Cons
Good customer support and handholding for integrations set up
Features go beyond spend management to handling finances with integrations and automation
Exhaustive mobile app features are on par with web apps.
Unlimited users across all pricing plans
Setup is time-consuming due to the variety of available customizations and features
Limited customization for approval workflows, data export, and reporting
Occasional glitches like sudden logouts, upload or data sync issues, etc.
Payhawk Pricing
Payhawk provides 3 pricing plans – Premium Cards, All-in-one Spends, and Enterprise plans whose pricing you can request. If your business has less than 50 employees and is registered in the EEA or UK/I, you can try Payhawk for £149 per month over 24 months.
Airbase
Best for Procure-to-pay Software
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationERP, HRIS
About Airbase
Airbase’s spend management solutions focus on automating procurement to payment workflows. They streamline those workflows by providing corporate cards, accounts payable automation, expense reporting tools, and 70+ ERP integrations. These tools bring much-needed visibility into business spending so that you can optimize them and stay compliant with your budget.
Airbase suits multi-entity companies looking for guided procurement software with ERP integrations and multi-currency to manage business spending.
Airbase Features
Guided procurement process: Automates complete procure-to-pay process with approval workflows without writing code.
360° spend visibility: Track service-level agreements across vendors and procurement metrics, identify risky or dormant payments, find cost-saving opportunities, and more with integrated spend analytics.
Fraud detection: Airbase can detect any attempts to change bank account details or card pins or modify spending limits.
Vendor portal: Manage vendor contracts, communication, invoices, payments, and purchase requests with a dedicated vendor dashboard.
Bill payments: Centralize and manage accounts payable using Airbase’s OCR technology to capture invoice or receipt details with 3-way matching for accuracy.
Airbase Pros/Cons
Businesses can create vendor-specific virtual corporate cards to avoid fraud or data breaches
Provides automated audit trail features like the record of approvals made, invoice inbox, documentation tracking, and more
Mobile app for on-the-go spend management
There are inconveniences, such as having to manually enter transactions, not being able to clone or copy similar transactions, and not being able to edit submitted requests.
Limited options to create custom reports
User interface is not adequately intuitive
Rippling Spend
Best for Automated Policy Controls
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationAccounting, SSO
About Rippling Spend
Rippling Spend is a spend management software that centralizes business expenses across payroll, corporate cards, travel, bills, and more. You can set up approval chains and spending limits to make sure employees adhere to spending policies and maintain operational budgets.
Rippling Spend offers 600+ integrations and a platform ecosystem that combines HRIS, IT, payroll, and spend management tools. This makes it an ideal choice for companies aiming to consolidate and reduce software costs by relying on Rippling Spend’s all-in-one product suite. Its extensive spend policy compliance features also make it ideal for companies struggling to control their budgets on-ground.
Rippling Spend Features
Corporate credit cards: Allows issuing branded physical and virtual corporate credit cards to track business spending in real-time. You can apply custom spend policies, generate reports on tracked transactions, and block/revoke access on non-adherence to rules.
Workflow automation: Use no-code to create custom fields and design workflows to automate manual tasks like assigning corporate cards, handling reimbursements, generating business expense reports, and more.
Permission profiles: Control data access for employees or departments, design expense approval chains, route approval requests to the right managers, etc.
Policy control: Rippling allows you to create ‘supergroups’ to dynamically assign employees based on their location and role. This avoids independently setting up manual policies like corporate card limits for each employee.
Bill payments: Automate bill generation when employees or vendors submit invoices or receipts. In a single dashboard, track overdue bills, generate forecast reports, and prioritize accounts payable.
Rippling Spend Pros/Cons
600+ integrations make it a flexible spend management software
Rippling product ecosystem makes employee expense management seamless from hiring to payroll with dedicated HRIS, IT, and global payroll solutions
Dashboard is intuitive and easy to navigate
Lacks accounting tools
Users report a poor onboarding process and a difficult setup
Provides modular pricing, which can get expensive for small businesses as most features are inter-dependent to function properly
Precoro
Best for Full Expense Control
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsNo
- IntegrationERP, Accounting, Analytics, Security
About Precoro
Precoro provides business spend management solutions that strongly focus on business expenses to simplify procurement process workflows. It follows a 2-4 week quick implementation procedure such that everyone from finance teams to procurement can stay on the same page to navigate and manage spending.
Precoro is suitable for medium to large businesses that want faster processing cycles, reduce purchase order costs, and control spending within their budgets.
Precoro Features
Spend optimization: Precoro’s procurement software offers visibility to identify cost-saving opportunities and optimize your purchasing approach by seamlessly modifying workflows.
Budgeting: Manage procurement expenses with the ones from other departments, track spending behaviour, and forecast to prepare for cost-cutting to meet budgets.
Supplier management: Find the best suppliers that meet your spending budgets and timelines, set up supplier approval workflows, streamline contracts, and more.
Accounts payable automation: Remove manual paperwork and data entry from invoicing workflows and manage billing cycles. This includes using OCR technology to match invoices with receipts and purchase orders in a 3-way fashion to ensure accuracy and avoid duplicates.
Interactive reporting: Create automated and custom reports using 120+ fields and 20+ filters. This includes tracking audit trails by comparing document versions.
Precoro Pros/Cons
Includes supplier and procurement management features for end-to-end spend management
ESG reporting features for companies maintaining sustainability compliances
Good customer support
Allows complete data export
Does not offer corporate cards
Integration options are limited to 10 nos. only
Does not allow advance or partial payments
Precoro Pricing
Additional charges include paid add-ons, concierge setup, and a one-time fee for adding new entities.
Precoro Plan | Pricing (annually) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Core | $499 | Automated approvals, real-time budget tracking, vendor management, reporting |
Automation | $999 | AP automation, supplier portal, ERP integrations |
Suite | Contact sales | Allows multiple entities, advanced security and admin controls, custom implementation |
Spendesk
Best for Real-Time Spend Visibility
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationAccounting, Travel, HR, SaaS
About Spendesk
Spendesk focuses on streamlining operational spending for better finance management. It centralizes budgeting, invoicing, business spend tracking, and smart corporate cards to capture every current and potential transaction for better financial planning.
Spendesk includes dedicated features for managing company spending across travel expenses, team perks, subscriptions, and digital advertising. This makes Spendesk ideal for small to medium businesses looking to streamline business expenses across multiple departments without facing complexity or added costs due to too many features.
Spendesk Features
Corporate credit cards: Get single-use physical and unlimited virtual cards with approval workflows and company spending limits to track every expense as your employees use them to make payments.
Contract management: Provides an interface for negotiating vendor terms with a better price structure, renewing contracts on time, viewing contract status and progress, implementing approval processes, and more.
Business travel expenses: Centralize booking travel tickets, track on-the-road receipts, and seamlessly reimburse employees for out-of-pocket expenses.
Budgeting: Pay invoices in bulk, track expenses in real-time, forecast expenses, and find ways to control them for better budgeting.
Payment solutions: Centralize expenses across subscriptions, team perks, reimbursements, and other online payments. Includes audit trailing of transactions and approvals for better transparency.
Spendesk Pros/Cons
Tracks multiple payment formats across subscriptions, travel, ads or marketing, reimbursements, and more.
Provides on-time use and unlimited physical and virtual cards with no extra fees
Allows unlimited users for all pricing plans
Limited features compared to competitors – for example, there are no accounting features, although you can integrate with other specialized accounting tools
Users report glitchy virtual card instances like failed transactions, inaccuracy in filling data fields, etc.
Coupa
AI-driven Business Spend Management
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationAccounting, ERP
About Coupa
Coupa offers specialized AI-powered spend management software that centralizes end-to-end procurement by centralizing workflows and automation. This includes cash flow management, supply chain design, vendor collaboration, procure-to-pay cycle automation, accounts payable, and more.
You can use AI to design and implement proactive procurement strategies and perform spend analysis to improve them more for cost optimization. The platform provides finance and accounting tools to get cash flow insights and mitigate potential over-budgeting risks.
Thus, Coupa is effective for medium to enterprise-scale organizations with complex supply chain and procurement workflows, enabling seamless business spend management.
Coupa Features
Manage sourcing: Source-to-contract features include templates to speed up quotations, using AI to create contracts, understanding key clauses from vendor contracts, performing sourcing scenarios, and more.
Supplier portal: Use AI to vet potential suppliers and seamlessly onboard them once the contract is in place. You can monitor supplier performance with market trends, manage a complete contract lifecycle, and detect risks to stay prepared for supplier shocks.
Expense management: Use OCR technology to capture receipts, spend guard for fraud detection, and design complex company spending approval workflow automation to reduce manual work.
Coupa pay: Implement pre-approved expenses, offer early pay discounts, pay vendor invoices, and use virtual cards to manage cash flow and payments.
Spend analysis: Capture data across complete business spending transactions and use AI to explore cost-saving strategies. The Coupa visual dashboard provides required visibility and insights into spend categories, market dynamics, and spend management efficiency metrics.
Coupa Pros/Cons
Exhaustive features to manage supply chain and procurement to payment workflows
Coupa is an AI-powered tool trained on its 10M+ supplier and buyer network data
Coupa community allows access to shared best practices and insights
Treasury management features like interest and loan management
Multi-entity support
Risk management modules are complex to set up and have a learning curve
User interface has an outdated design and is not user-friendly. It’s hard to find information
Slow customer support
Mesh Payments
Best for Real-Time Reporting
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationAccounting, HRIS, SSO, SaaS
About Mesh Payments
Mesh Payments manages business spending by optimizing for costs, implementing spending limits, real-time reporting, forecasting expenses, and much more.
Mesh Payments does not charge extra forex fees and includes support for tax automation, expense reporting, and card management – all globally. This makes it suitable for companies with a global footprint looking for spend management software with comprehensive reporting capabilities for visibility.
Mesh Payments Features
Spend controls: Place adequate vendor rules, lock-in periods, or spending limits to control company spending. Get alerted if anyone crosses pre-defined spending policy rules to ensure strict compliance.
Permissions: Implement approval workflows to accept or review submitted expenses or procurement transactions.
Spend reports: Track company spending in real-time and generate custom reports to know alternative cost-effective options for procurement.
Spend optimization: Identify duplicate payments, track transactions for auditing, perform forecasts, use reminders for on-time spend data collection, and more.
Plug and Pay cards: Provides pre-approved virtual and physical VISA corporate cards with security for fraud detection, custom spend limits, and more. Includes cashback on payments.
Mesh Payments Pros/Cons
Provides discounts and offers on leading vendors to help companies save procurement costs
Includes travel expense management software features for mobile teams
Integrates with mobile wallets like GPay, Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, etc for easier mobile payments
Versatile spend management options for expenses across SaaS, travel, employee engagement budgets, and more
Limited user-level customizations, like the inability to create custom categories or tags
Users report issues in card acceptance by some vendors
Mesh Payments Pricing
Mesh Payments Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Free | $0 | Includes global spend management features |
Premium | $10 | Includes features to scale and control spending management |
Enterprise | Contact sales | Enterprise features with travel expense management |
Ramp
Best for Corporate Card Management
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationAccounting, Security, Expense Automation
About Ramp
Ramp is designed for finance teams to streamline business spending across travel, procurement, administration, and other accounts payable transactions. Its software and pricing structure have been designed to meet unique needs ranging from startups to small businesses, mid-market companies, and enterprises.
You can implement extended payment terms and design unlimited custom virtual cards for various company spending categories. You can also link different virtual cards to your physical card for seamless card management. This makes Ramp a great option for companies of all sizes looking for corporate card management features.
Ramp Features
AI automation: Use AI algorithms to automate receipt collection, extract data from them, generate missing receipt data based on sales data, automate invoice workflows, and more.
Accounts payable: Categorize transactions using AI and historical transaction patterns. Ramp’s AI also helps review transactions based on designed spending policies to reduce manual work.
Budgeting: Create pre-defined budgets and include relevant stakeholders in designing custom approval chains and travel routes. Use AI-led expense analysis to gain insights into business spending patterns.
Procurement: Centralize procurement workflows and use AI to create or manage contract documents. Includes 3-way matching to validate submitted invoices with receipts and purchase orders.
Global corporate card and payments: Ramp allows spend management across 40 currencies, provides global reimbursement support in their local currency in 70 countries, and supports international taxation for seamless accounting.
Ramp Pros/Cons
Provides unlimited virtual cards
Includes dedicated features for mileage reimbursements and enforcing travel policies
Includes multi-entity and multi-currency support
Integrates directly with Gmail, Amazon, and Uber to capture receipt data
Pricing plans are user-based, making it not ideal for organizations with large teams
Navigation is not intuitive – for example, the menus are difficult to explore for available customization options
Reporting is limited to dashboards – and may require using third-party analytics tools for deeper insights
Ramp Pricing
Contact Ramp’s sales team for annual billing pricing.
Ramp Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Free | $0 | Unlimited virtual corporate cards, accounting software, and expense management automation. |
Ramp Plus | $15 | Custom user roles, multi-entity and currency support, ERP integrations, and procurement automation. |
Ramp Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom implementation and SOX compliance with premium support. |
Brex
AI-powered Expense Review Management
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardYes
- IntegrationERP, Accounting
About Brex
Brex provides exhaustive card management features to help businesses automate and streamline their spend management workflows. It is designed for ‘continuous close’ – which means it uses AI-powered automation to help with real-time management of accounts payable, bookkeeping, reporting, invoice management, and more.
It syncs and shares data with leading ERP solution providers like NetSuite or Quickbooks for seamless accounting. It also helps manage global business spending and reimbursements. Such features make Brex ideal for companies overseeing transactions and expense reviews in depth for better budget controls.
Brex Features
Corporate cards: Brex cards (issued over Mastercard) are globally accepted for their physical and virtual cards. They support tracking expenses in 100+ currencies and reimbursing employees in 30+ currencies in the local bank account.
Multi-entity spend controls: Track business spending and add spend limits across headquarters and subsidiary transactions in real-time.
Travel expense management: Brex provides a single platform for managing global travel booking, controlling group spending, and navigating itinerary changes. It also provides exclusive airline deals with carriers like EasyJet or Frontier.
Enforce spending policy: Brex helps implement rules on spending across bill payments, cards, reimbursements, and travel. Using AI, you can determine which expenses adhere to the spending policy for approval and gain insights into the effectiveness of your policies.
Live budgets: Monitor company spending patterns in real-time and strategize budgets by setting up ‘pre-approved’ spending. Generate reports across various expenses to optimize budgets further.
Brex Pros/Cons
Allows B2B software companies to integrate Brex cards into their product suite to earn additional revenues
No FX markups
Multi-currency and multi-entity support
Effective expense reporting features across spending, compliance, budgets, travel, and more
Slow onboarding and difficult setup
Users report a long and time-consuming verification process
User-based pricing may not be suitable for large teams
Brex Pricing
Brex Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Free | $0 | Global corporate credit cards, bill payments, and accounting integrations. |
Premium | $12 | Custom expense policies, procurement workflows, and live budgeting with tracking. |
Enterprise | Contact sales | Support for local currency payments, custom compliances with unlimited policy customization, and premium support. |
Certify
Best for Small Businesses
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationNetSuite, Paycor, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct
About Certify
Certify is a travel and spend management software designed for the unique needs of mid-sized companies. It focuses on improving business spending visibility to help you perform reimbursements on time according to strict policy compliances set by your finance teams.
SMEs can take their ventures global as Certify supports 64 languages and 140+ currencies for spend management. With its auditing, 40+ standard expense reporting, and integrations with other accounting tools, you can further streamline and simplify your finances.
Certify Features
Emburse cards: Issue virtual and physical cards to allow employees to make pre-approved business purchases. Set up custom policies and budgets for every transaction category to block unauthorized transactions at the point of sale itself.
Certify payments: Perform transactions globally to instantly reimburse employee expenses as per local regulations across various supported payment modes, including checks.
Track and audit: Certify tracks complete expense-to-payment flow to help generate 40+ exhaustive reports across reconciliation, client billables, expense policy metrics, travel expenses, taxes, and more.
Travel spend management: Implement pre-trip approvals and access corporate rates for travel bookings to save on travel costs. Capture, sync, and share travel expense data for seamless accounting.
Invoice management: Use OCR technology and approval automation to get visibility into the complete invoice cycle. You can also automate manual tasks to improve business cash flows and navigate compliance risks with vendors.
Certify Pros/Cons
Simple and easy-to-use spend management software
Allows check payments
Cost-effective option for global and multi-entity businesses
Responsive and effective customer support
Lacks procurement expense management features to handle and control vendor payments
Users report poor recognition of hand-written receipts
Compared to the web app, Certify’s mobile app features are limited to receipt capture only
Bill.com [Formerly Divvy]
Best for Accounts Payable Automation
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationAccounting, HRIS
About BILL
BILL provides finance management solutions for streamlining and automating accounts payables, accounts receivables, expenses, and spend management workflows. Such holistic coverage helps BILL enable businesses with exhaustive spend tracking, payments, and automation features for simpler accounting.
It also provides corporate cards with automatic expense categorization. This quickens the pace of effective reconciliation to get visibility into business spending and feed the data into accounting systems. BILL is a great choice for businesses looking for a single platform to capture data across payables, receivables, and expenses for improved accuracy and continuous accounting workflows.
BILL Features
BILL Divvy card: Powered by Visa, the BILL Divvy Card allows implementing spending limits and earning rewards on transactions. Includes access to business credit ranging from $1000-5M and a contactless payment feature.
Budget management: Design custom spending policies for employees based on their roles and ownership. Review company spending on a real-time dashboard to adjust budgets for better spending management.
Accounts payable: Automate end-to-end payables process, from capturing bills to making payments and syncing data for further accounting.
Expense reimbursements: Track reimbursements in one place with real-time visibility into company spending. A payroll system can manage employee payouts using automatic ACH transfers.
Expense reporting: Helps catch unauthorized payments, generates financial reports to track historical expense vs. budget, and performs forecasts.
BILL Pros/Cons
No annual corporate card fees
US-based businesses can build their credit score with Small Business Financial Exchange (SBFE®)
Allows check payments
Forever free expense and spend management software
Provided dedicated ‘Accountant console’ for better visibility on managing cashflows
Limited integrations – BILL’s expense and spend management solutions offer a 1-way sync with Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks Online/Desktop, and Sage Intacct
No dedicated procurement management features for handling vendor-related spending
SAP Concur
Best for Global Enterprise
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationERP, Accounting, HR
About SAP Concur
SAP Concur offers spend management solutions as part of its ERP suite of products for holistic monitoring of business expenses. This includes expenses related to resource procurement, travel, administration, external contractors, services, and more.
It provides advanced features to centralize procurement by automating manual tasks involved across source-to-contract-to-pay processes. You can perform contractor discovery, manage contracts, automate invoices, oversee suppliers, process payments, and more. Integrated with SAP’s mature product ecosystem, SAP Concur is suitable for large enterprise businesses that seek scalable and secure software to manage all aspects of business spending.
SAP Concur Features
SAP spend control tower: Aggregates company spending data and uses AI to categorize it to obtain insights on supplier and cost optimization. It includes dashboards to track business spending KPIs and identify potential supplier risks.
Procure-to-pay: The SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing solution automates procurement processes and enhances supplier collaboration. It also helps with supplier vetting and document management and alerts you about vendors who don’t fit your spending policies.
Global taxation support: Track and manage suppliers with support for 24 languages across 190 countries. It helps navigate local regulations and tax calculations on your business spending.
Invoice management: SAP Concur’s 3-way matching of purchase orders, invoices, and receipts accurately automates the invoice process. This ensures timely payments, avoids duplicates, provides visibility into invoice patterns, and removes manual data entry tasks.
Travel expense management: Helps consolidate your business travel workflows, including booking transportation, handling employee reimbursement, adhering to spending policies, and more.
SAP Concur Pros/Cons
Enables organizations to stay compliant with their sustainability goals by optimizing the choice of suppliers
Includes features to manage ‘global service providers or workforce’ spending
SAP Business Network Discovery helps match qualified and relevant sources for procurement
User interface is not intuitive and has a learning curve. Companies may require investing in implementation partners for smooth onboarding
Users report SAP Concur is slow to operate
Expensive for small and medium businesses (SMBs)
Workday
All-in-One Finance, IT and HR Management
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsNo
- IntegrationWorkday HCM
About Workday
Workday provides HR, planning, and finance-integrated software, including AI-powered spend management solutions. It makes you proactive in managing your business spending. The data captured helps further automate and get a complete picture of your employee and finance management workflows.
It also helps maintain supplier relationships and hygiene as per the business spending policy. This includes providing insights to facilitate supplier negotiations and cost control. Workday’s enterprise-grade functionality across IT, HR, and finance management makes it ideal for medium to enterprise companies looking for an all-in-one integrated solution for spend management, planning, and AI automation.
Workday Features
Supplier management: Helps source relevant suppliers that meet business spending policy. This includes managing pipelines and contracts and negotiations with self-service suppliers for onboarding.
Expense reporting: Workday AI helps extract data from invoices and receipts to generate comprehensive reports for auditing, risk assessment, spend control, and more.
Workday HCM: Direct integration with Workday’s Human Capital Management helps centralize employee engagement, process reimbursements, procure external workforce, align employee’s submitted expenses with spending policy, and more.
Procure-to-pay: Manage all purchase orders, automate supplier invoices, and implement spend controls as per policy to streamline procurement workflows.
Inventory management: Track inventory to forecast required expenses for better budget management. You can implement stock approval workflows, analyze inventory performance, and share data with finance management tools to streamline accounting.
Workday Pros/Cons
Allows submitting expenses via mobile app, emails, Microsoft Teams or Slack
Simple and intuitive user interface design
Versatile ERP-first features enable end-to-end spending management
Mature integration ecosystem of 600+ tools with a developed API framework
Expensive for small and medium businesses (SMBs)
Requires investing in training staff for effective implementation
Does not provide corporate credit cards
Tipalti
Best for Automated Payment Processing
- Multi-currency SupportYes
- Corporate CardsYes
- IntegrationERP, Accounting, HRIS, SSO
About Tipalti
Tipalti is finance automation software that helps centralize accounts payable, spend management, and payments in a single platform. It removes manual tasks related to managing invoices and suppliers via self-service onboarding, taxes, employee reimbursements, and more.
Tipalti supports global payments by enabling your business with 50+ payment options across 120 currencies in 196 countries. With 20,000+ spend rules, you can control and automate payments for accuracy and speed. Such comprehensive payment features make Tipalti an ideal choice for companies looking to automate high-volume transactions and reduce payment risks due to errors.
Tipalti Features
Tipalti cards: Implement spend control rules, automate reconciliations with ERP integrations, reimburse employees worldwide, and earn cashback.
Supplier management: Tipalti’s customizable self-service onboarding empowers suppliers to securely submit payment details, raise invoices, and streamline tax management.
Invoice management: Using OCR technology, Tipalti automates data capture from invoices and performs 3-way matching invoices with purchase orders and receipts. It also improves stakeholder collaboration with in-built communication tools like messaging and comments.
Tax automation: Access KPMG-approved tax engine that supports 3000+ global and US tax regulations. It helps you adhere to IRS requirements, digitize the collection of tax forms, and e-file for on-time year-end tax management.
AI workflow automation: Tipalti’s smart AI scan captures data from invoices, corporate card transactions, and offline receipts. It predicts coding for purchase orders and invoices, automates bill approval flows, and alerts when it detects duplicate transactions or errors.
Tipalti Pros/Cons
30+ ERP integrations help businesses implement seamless finance management workflows
Allows splitting transactions
Exhaustive features to manage and automate global payments with local tax compliance
Responsive customer support
Easy to use and navigate to get work done
Users report slow software
Initial setup and onboarding are time-consuming for both admin businesses and payees (vendors)
Long payment processing timelines
Tipalti Pricing
Tipalti Plan | Pricing (monthly) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Starter | $99 | AI smart scans, supplier portal, and ERP integrations |
Premium | Contact sales | 3-way PO matching, multi-entity with currency support, and mass payments |
Elite | Contact sales | Advanced approval workflows, budget management, and Slack integration |
What is Spend Management Software?
Spend management software centralizes the tracking, extracting, managing, and analyzing your complete spending data across business operations. The aim is to reduce expenses, vendor risk, and budget fluctuations by placing automated spend control measures.
Effective spend management solutions typically include accounts payable, procurement, and expense management tools. Together, they work to automate end-to-end spend management with the five key processes:
- Collect company spending data from receipts, invoices, emails, bills, purchase orders, etc.
- Categorize spend data into spend types like employee expenses, travel, vendor fees, etc.
- Optimize budget by comparing expense data with modelled financial budgets and forecast deviations or future risks.
- Implement approval workflows and spend control measures to reduce the gap between business spending and budget.
- Prepare expense reports to track KPIs, identify business spending patterns, strategize for optimizing spending, and more.
Performing the above tasks manually will consume your finance team’s productive time.
Spend management tools automate manual tasks across these 5 processes so that your finance teams can focus on the spend control strategy and its implementation.
What is the Difference Between Expense Management Software and Spend Management Software?
Expense management software focuses on tracking and reimbursing expenses made by employees after the transaction has occurred. In contrast, spend management software focuses on proactive control of total business expenditures across operations even before the transactions have occurred.
Let’s understand this better with key differences across their primary functions and use cases:
Criteria | Spend Management Software | Expense Management Software |
---|---|---|
Primary function | Manage overall business expenditures across procurement, travel, adminstration, and more. | Track, control, and reimburse employee-initiated costs as per the company’s expense policy. |
Approach | Proactive (strategically managing all expenditures) | Reactive (responding to submitted expenses) |
Scope | Broad focus on business spending. | Narrow focus on employee expenses. |
Users | Finance, procurement, and HR management teams. | Employees and HR departments. |
Key features | Automate and manage procurement processes, suppliers, contracts, and budgets. Includes performing forecasts and spending analysis for decision-making. | Receipt capture, policy enforcement, automated reimbursements, expense reporting, and approval workflows. |
Key integrations | Typically integrates with ERP systems for holistic financial management. | Travel management apps, hotel bookings, cabs, or HRIS systems. |
Use case example | Source and negotiate with vendors that comply with procurement budgets and forecasts. | Manage employee travel or engagement activities. |
What are the Benefits of Using Spend Management Software?
Spend management software provides visibility into your expense transactions, which leads to the below key benefits:
Save Costs
Spend management tools like Coupa, SAP Concur, and Workday help you source relevant suppliers or alternative cheaper options using historical purchase data and current requirements. Other tools analyze spending patterns to identify vendors that deviate from your budget or spending policy. Thus, spend management software helps negotiate better deals with suppliers and eliminate unnecessary expenses to save costs.
Improve the Finance Team’s Efficiency and Productivity
Spend management software helps automate manual workflows like creating invoices or contracts, recurring payments, receipt data extraction, and more. It can also sync business spending data with third-party software like accounting tools, HRIS, and IT – thus effectively reducing the need for data migration and minimizing errors.
Advanced spend management tools like Rippling, BILL, Precoro, Coupa, Payhawk, Tipalti, and more can do more with AI automation capabilities. They can perform tasks that require intelligence – like determining eligible transactions for reimbursements as per spend policy, preparing expense reports, or suggesting budget adjustments.
These features free finance teams to focus on strategic budgeting and its implementation rather than administrative tasks.
Manage Risks and Compliances
Procurement processes are often riddled with compliance or overspending risks.
For example, some vendors may suddenly increase prices or cease to operate, which can disrupt your procurement budgets. A global company may experience a sudden increase in business spending due to local market dynamics in a foreign subsidiary.
Spend management software like Coupa, Airbase, Certify, SAP Concur, and Workday make you resilient to vendor risks by improving your business agility with their risk management solutions. For example, these tools can suggest relevant vendors to replace them beforehand or on time. Other spend management tools like Mesh Payments, Ramp, Certify, Sap Concur, and Tipalti offer tax automation capabilities that help avoid taxation risks, especially for globally-operated companies.
Future Trends in Spend Management Software You Must Know
Choosing a spend management software that regularly updates existing features and upgrades with new technologies is always beneficial. Here are some key trends to keep track of:
- Predictive analytics: Using data analytics and Generative AI to effectively use historical and real-time business spending data to forecast complex procurement scenarios. This is crucial to strategize navigating dynamic supply chain markets and adjust your budgets accordingly.
- User-centric approach: Look for spend management software with a mobile app, modern user interface design, and intuitive navigation. This is key to improving software adoption by vendors and employees to realize the return on investment, especially for remotely operated companies.
- Cybersecurity: Having provisions for enterprise-grade data security via user roles and permission workflows, data encryption, real-time transaction monitoring, multi-factor authentications to prevent unauthorized access, and audit logs help with fraud detection and prevention.
Final Words
Spend management software is the missing piece to optimize your finance management workflows for smarter business spending. It helps you avoid overspending and control budgets by giving you complete visibility into transactions and enforcing company spending policies.
Spend management software makes your business agile toward dynamic markets and expenditures. Hence, choose a suitable one that is agile enough to adapt to your changing financial workflows and the uncertainties you experience in the quest for achieving healthy business growth.