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
  • Show moreShow less

You can trust Geekflare

At Geekflare, trust and transparency are paramount. Our team of experts, with over 185 years of combined experience in business and technology, tests and reviews software, ensuring our ratings and awards are unbiased and reliable. Learn how we test.

Pleo

Pleo

Best for Employee Spending Management

Geekflare rating score 4.8 out of 5
4.8
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    No
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    Accounting, NetSuite, HRIS
$39/month
Try Pleo

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Spend controls: Use multi-step approval workflows and custom spend limits to track and control spending across multi-entity organizations.

  • Key feature

    Automation: Design automation workflows to chase receipts, invoices, and report generation to analyze employee spending.

  • Key feature

    Recurring payments: Handle subscriptions seamlessly on autopilot and catch any duplicates or remove unused services.

Pleo Pros/Cons

  • Advantage

    User-friendly mobile app and website for both user and admin profiles

  • Advantage

    Provides both physical and virtual corporate credit cards

  • Advantage

    OCR technology to scan receipts and invoices

  • Advantage

    Responsive and effective customer support

  • Advantage

    Offers good integration options across accounting, communication, HRIS, procurement software, etc.

  • Disadvantage

    Users report glitches like invoice document uploading errors, misaligned tags, transaction failures, etc.

  • Disadvantage

    Features focus on employee spending use cases rather than complete spend management

  • Disadvantage

    Pleo focuses on the European market

Pleo Pricing

Pleo PlanPrice (monthly)Offerings
Essential$39Cards, Real-time expense tracking, Automated expense reports, Accounting system integrations, Recurring vendor management, Flexible card limits, Automated review flows
Advanced $89Multi-entity management, Advanced controls, Advanced user roles and permissions, HRIS integrations, Phone support
Beyond$179Spending insights, Assisted onboarding, Concierge support, Customer success manager
Moss

Moss

Best for Financial Transparency and Control

Geekflare rating score 4.2 out of 5
4.2
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    No
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integrations
    ERP, SSO, HRIS
Pricing on Request
Try Moss

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Integrations: Moss provides 2-way integrations with major HR, ERP, SSO, and accounting tools like Oracle, QuickBooks, Workday, Deel, Azure, TravelPerk, and others.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Single platform pricing – No user-based pricing makes it cost-effective for organizations with high headcounts

  • Advantage

    Responsive customer support

  • Advantage

    User-friendly and modern interface design

  • Advantage

    Seamless corporate credit card management with unlimited physical and virtual cards

  • Disadvantage

    Does not support multi-entity visibility

  • Disadvantage

    Inadequate receipt management features – users report Moss does not automatically capture receipts from emails; there are occasional issues in data extraction from receipts.

Payhawk

Payhawk

Best for Global Spend Management

Geekflare rating score 4.5 out of 5
4.5
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    ERP, Accounting, HR, SSO
Pricing on Request
Try Payhawk

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

  • Key feature

    AI-enabled accounting software: Uses AI algorithms to simplify accounting, including bank reconciliations, receipt data entry, match fields, expense codes, and more.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Security: Includes provisions to comply with local regulatory laws and is SOC1, PCI DSS, and SOC2 compliant with 24/7 monitoring for added security.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Good customer support and handholding for integrations set up

  • Advantage

    Features go beyond spend management to handling finances with integrations and automation

  • Advantage

    Exhaustive mobile app features are on par with web apps.

  • Advantage

    Unlimited users across all pricing plans

  • Disadvantage

    Setup is time-consuming due to the variety of available customizations and features

  • Disadvantage

    Limited customization for approval workflows, data export, and reporting

  • Disadvantage

    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

Airbase

Best for Procure-to-pay Software

Geekflare rating score 4.8 out of 5
4.8
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    ERP, HRIS
Pricing on Request
Try Airbase

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

  • Key feature

    Guided procurement process: Automates complete procure-to-pay process with approval workflows without writing code.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Fraud detection: Airbase can detect any attempts to change bank account details or card pins or modify spending limits.

  • Key feature

    Vendor portal: Manage vendor contracts, communication, invoices, payments, and purchase requests with a dedicated vendor dashboard.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Businesses can create vendor-specific virtual corporate cards to avoid fraud or data breaches

  • Advantage

    Provides automated audit trail features like the record of approvals made, invoice inbox, documentation tracking, and more

  • Advantage

    Mobile app for on-the-go spend management

  • Disadvantage

    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.

  • Disadvantage

    Limited options to create custom reports

  • Disadvantage

    User interface is not adequately intuitive

Rippling Spend

Rippling Spend

Best for Automated Policy Controls

Geekflare rating score 4.8 out of 5
4.8
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    Accounting, SSO
Pricing on Request
Try Rippling

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Permission profiles: Control data access for employees or departments, design expense approval chains, route approval requests to the right managers, etc.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    600+ integrations make it a flexible spend management software

  • Advantage

    Rippling product ecosystem makes employee expense management seamless from hiring to payroll with dedicated HRIS, IT, and global payroll solutions

  • Advantage

    Dashboard is intuitive and easy to navigate

  • Disadvantage

    Lacks accounting tools

  • Disadvantage

    Users report a poor onboarding process and a difficult setup

  • Disadvantage

    Provides modular pricing, which can get expensive for small businesses as most features are inter-dependent to function properly

Precoro

Precoro

Best for Full Expense Control

Geekflare rating score 4.8 out of 5
4.8
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    No
  • Integration
    ERP, Accounting, Analytics, Security
$499/month
Try Precoro

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

  • Key feature

    Spend optimization: Precoro’s procurement software offers visibility to identify cost-saving opportunities and optimize your purchasing approach by seamlessly modifying workflows.

  • Key feature

    Budgeting: Manage procurement expenses with the ones from other departments, track spending behaviour, and forecast to prepare for cost-cutting to meet budgets.

  • Key feature

    Supplier management: Find the best suppliers that meet your spending budgets and timelines, set up supplier approval workflows, streamline contracts, and more.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Includes supplier and procurement management features for end-to-end spend management

  • Advantage

    ESG reporting features for companies maintaining sustainability compliances

  • Advantage

    Good customer support

  • Advantage

    Allows complete data export

  • Disadvantage

    Does not offer corporate cards

  • Disadvantage

    Integration options are limited to 10 nos. only

  • Disadvantage

    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 PlanPricing (annually)Offerings
Core$499Automated approvals, real-time budget tracking, vendor management, reporting
Automation$999AP automation, supplier portal, ERP integrations
SuiteContact salesAllows multiple entities, advanced security and admin controls, custom implementation
Spendesk

Spendesk

Best for Real-Time Spend Visibility

Geekflare rating score 4.8 out of 5
4.8
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    Accounting, Travel, HR, SaaS
Pricing on Request
Try Spendesk

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Business travel expenses: Centralize booking travel tickets, track on-the-road receipts, and seamlessly reimburse employees for out-of-pocket expenses.

  • Key feature

    Budgeting: Pay invoices in bulk, track expenses in real-time, forecast expenses, and find ways to control them for better budgeting.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Tracks multiple payment formats across subscriptions, travel, ads or marketing, reimbursements, and more.

  • Advantage

    Provides on-time use and unlimited physical and virtual cards with no extra fees

  • Advantage

    Allows unlimited users for all pricing plans

  • Disadvantage

    Limited features compared to competitors – for example, there are no accounting features, although you can integrate with other specialized accounting tools

  • Disadvantage

    Users report glitchy virtual card instances like failed transactions, inaccuracy in filling data fields, etc.

Coupa

Coupa

AI-driven Business Spend Management

Geekflare rating score 4.3 out of 5
4.3
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    Accounting, ERP
Pricing on Request
Try Coupa

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Coupa pay: Implement pre-approved expenses, offer early pay discounts, pay vendor invoices, and use virtual cards to manage cash flow and payments.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Exhaustive features to manage supply chain and procurement to payment workflows

  • Advantage

    Coupa is an AI-powered tool trained on its 10M+ supplier and buyer network data

  • Advantage

    Coupa community allows access to shared best practices and insights

  • Advantage

    Treasury management features like interest and loan management

  • Advantage

    Multi-entity support

  • Disadvantage

    Risk management modules are complex to set up and have a learning curve

  • Disadvantage

    User interface has an outdated design and is not user-friendly. It’s hard to find information

  • Disadvantage

    Slow customer support

Mesh Payments

Mesh Payments

Best for Real-Time Reporting

Geekflare rating score 4.5 out of 5
4.5
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    Accounting, HRIS, SSO, SaaS
FREE
1% Cashback for Every Payment
Try Mesh Payments

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Permissions: Implement approval workflows to accept or review submitted expenses or procurement transactions.

  • Key feature

    Spend reports: Track company spending in real-time and generate custom reports to know alternative cost-effective options for procurement.

  • Key feature

    Spend optimization: Identify duplicate payments, track transactions for auditing, perform forecasts, use reminders for on-time spend data collection, and more.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Provides discounts and offers on leading vendors to help companies save procurement costs

  • Advantage

    Includes travel expense management software features for mobile teams

  • Advantage

    Integrates with mobile wallets like GPay, Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, etc for easier mobile payments

  • Advantage

    Versatile spend management options for expenses across SaaS, travel, employee engagement budgets, and more

  • Disadvantage

    Limited user-level customizations, like the inability to create custom categories or tags

  • Disadvantage

    Users report issues in card acceptance by some vendors

Mesh Payments Pricing

Mesh Payments PlanPricing (per user/month)Offerings
Free$0Includes global spend management features
Premium$10Includes features to scale and control spending management
EnterpriseContact salesEnterprise features with travel expense management
Ramp

Ramp

Best for Corporate Card Management

Geekflare rating score 4.8 out of 5
4.8
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    Accounting, 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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Provides unlimited virtual cards

  • Advantage

    Includes dedicated features for mileage reimbursements and enforcing travel policies

  • Advantage

    Includes multi-entity and multi-currency support

  • Advantage

    Integrates directly with Gmail, Amazon, and Uber to capture receipt data

  • Disadvantage

    Pricing plans are user-based, making it not ideal for organizations with large teams

  • Disadvantage

    Navigation is not intuitive – for example, the menus are difficult to explore for available customization options

  • Disadvantage

    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 PlanPricing (per user/month)Offerings
Free$0Unlimited virtual corporate cards, accounting software, and expense management automation.
Ramp Plus$15Custom user roles, multi-entity and currency support, ERP integrations, and procurement automation.
Ramp EnterpriseContact salesCustom implementation and SOX compliance with premium support.
Brex

Brex

AI-powered Expense Review Management

Geekflare rating score 4.6 out of 5
4.6
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Card
    Yes
  • Integration
    ERP, 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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Multi-entity spend controls: Track business spending and add spend limits across headquarters and subsidiary transactions in real-time.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Allows B2B software companies to integrate Brex cards into their product suite to earn additional revenues

  • Advantage

    No FX markups

  • Advantage

    Multi-currency and multi-entity support

  • Advantage

    Effective expense reporting features across spending, compliance, budgets, travel, and more

  • Disadvantage

    Slow onboarding and difficult setup

  • Disadvantage

    Users report a long and time-consuming verification process

  • Disadvantage

    User-based pricing may not be suitable for large teams

Brex Pricing

Brex PlanPricing (per user/month)Offerings
Free$0Global corporate credit cards, bill payments, and accounting integrations.
Premium$12Custom expense policies, procurement workflows, and live budgeting with tracking.
EnterpriseContact salesSupport for local currency payments, custom compliances with unlimited policy customization, and premium support.
Certify

Certify

Best for Small Businesses

Geekflare rating score 4.5 out of 5
4.5
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    NetSuite, Paycor, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct
Pricing on Request
Try Certify

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Certify payments: Perform transactions globally to instantly reimburse employee expenses as per local regulations across various supported payment modes, including checks.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Simple and easy-to-use spend management software

  • Advantage

    Allows check payments

  • Advantage

    Cost-effective option for global and multi-entity businesses

  • Advantage

    Responsive and effective customer support

  • Disadvantage

    Lacks procurement expense management features to handle and control vendor payments

  • Disadvantage

    Users report poor recognition of hand-written receipts

  • Disadvantage

    Compared to the web app, Certify’s mobile app features are limited to receipt capture only

Bill.com [Formerly Divvy]

Bill.com [Formerly Divvy]

Best for Accounts Payable Automation

Geekflare rating score 4.2 out of 5
4.2
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    Accounting, 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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key 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.

  • Key feature

    Accounts payable: Automate end-to-end payables process, from capturing bills to making payments and syncing data for further accounting.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Expense reporting: Helps catch unauthorized payments, generates financial reports to track historical expense vs. budget, and performs forecasts.

BILL Pros/Cons

  • Advantage

    No annual corporate card fees

  • Advantage

    US-based businesses can build their credit score with Small Business Financial Exchange (SBFE®)

  • Advantage

    Allows check payments

  • Advantage

    Forever free expense and spend management software

  • Advantage

    Provided dedicated ‘Accountant console’ for better visibility on managing cashflows

  • Disadvantage

    Limited integrations – BILL’s expense and spend management solutions offer a 1-way sync with Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks Online/Desktop, and Sage Intacct

  • Disadvantage

    No dedicated procurement management features for handling vendor-related spending

SAP Concur

SAP Concur

Best for Global Enterprise

Geekflare rating score 4.0 out of 5
4.0
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    ERP, Accounting, HR
Pricing on Request
Try SAP Concur

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Enables organizations to stay compliant with their sustainability goals by optimizing the choice of suppliers

  • Advantage

    Includes features to manage ‘global service providers or workforce’ spending

  • Advantage

    SAP Business Network Discovery helps match qualified and relevant sources for procurement

  • Disadvantage

    User interface is not intuitive and has a learning curve. Companies may require investing in implementation partners for smooth onboarding

  • Disadvantage

    Users report SAP Concur is slow to operate

  • Disadvantage

    Expensive for small and medium businesses (SMBs)

Workday

Workday

All-in-One Finance, IT and HR Management

Geekflare rating score 4.2 out of 5
4.2
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    No
  • Integration
    Workday HCM
Pricing on Request
Try Workday

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

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Expense reporting: Workday AI helps extract data from invoices and receipts to generate comprehensive reports for auditing, risk assessment, spend control, and more.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    Procure-to-pay: Manage all purchase orders, automate supplier invoices, and implement spend controls as per policy to streamline procurement workflows.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    Allows submitting expenses via mobile app, emails, Microsoft Teams or Slack

  • Advantage

    Simple and intuitive user interface design

  • Advantage

    Versatile ERP-first features enable end-to-end spending management

  • Advantage

    Mature integration ecosystem of 600+ tools with a developed API framework

  • Disadvantage

    Expensive for small and medium businesses (SMBs)

  • Disadvantage

    Requires investing in training staff for effective implementation

  • Disadvantage

    Does not provide corporate credit cards

Tipalti

Tipalti

Best for Automated Payment Processing

Geekflare rating score 4.5 out of 5
4.5
|
  • Multi-currency Support
    Yes
  • Corporate Cards
    Yes
  • Integration
    ERP, Accounting, HRIS, SSO
$99/month
Try Tipalti

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

  • Key feature

    Tipalti cards: Implement spend control rules, automate reconciliations with ERP integrations, reimburse employees worldwide, and earn cashback.

  • Key feature

    Supplier management: Tipalti’s customizable self-service onboarding empowers suppliers to securely submit payment details, raise invoices, and streamline tax management.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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.

  • Key feature

    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

  • Advantage

    30+ ERP integrations help businesses implement seamless finance management workflows

  • Advantage

    Allows splitting transactions

  • Advantage

    Exhaustive features to manage and automate global payments with local tax compliance

  • Advantage

    Responsive customer support

  • Advantage

    Easy to use and navigate to get work done

  • Disadvantage

    Users report slow software

  • Disadvantage

    Initial setup and onboarding are time-consuming for both admin businesses and payees (vendors)

  • Disadvantage

    Long payment processing timelines

Tipalti Pricing

Tipalti PlanPricing (monthly)Offerings
Starter$99AI smart scans, supplier portal, and ERP integrations
PremiumContact sales3-way PO matching, multi-entity with currency support, and mass payments
EliteContact salesAdvanced 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:

  1. Collect company spending data from receipts, invoices, emails, bills, purchase orders, etc.
  2. Categorize spend data into spend types like employee expenses, travel, vendor fees, etc.
  3. Optimize budget by comparing expense data with modelled financial budgets and forecast deviations or future risks.
  4. Implement approval workflows and spend control measures to reduce the gap between business spending and budget.
  5. 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:

CriteriaSpend Management SoftwareExpense Management Software
Primary functionManage overall business expenditures across procurement, travel, adminstration, and more.Track, control, and reimburse employee-initiated costs as per the company’s expense policy.
ApproachProactive (strategically managing all expenditures)Reactive (responding to submitted expenses)
ScopeBroad focus on business spending.Narrow focus on employee expenses.
UsersFinance, procurement, and HR management teams.Employees and HR departments.
Key featuresAutomate 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 integrationsTypically integrates with ERP systems for holistic financial management.Travel management apps, hotel bookings, cabs, or HRIS systems.
Use case exampleSource 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.

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.

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