Top 8 spend management software for your business
When it comes to growing your business, revenue is just one part of the equation. You also need to carefully manage expenditures and allocate resources for maximum efficiency.
Beyond the dangers of employee overspending, information silos can pose an even larger threat to your budget. Without a big-picture view of where your organization spends its money, decision-makers struggle to plan effectively and make data-driven decisions. Likewise, inefficient systems for managing expenses can lead to discrepancies across financial records and create unnecessary uncertainty.
Spend management software can alleviate—or even eliminate—many of these challenges. By consolidating different buckets of company spend—like payroll, expense reimbursements, corporate cards, and vendor bills—the right spend management platform can help you control costs while empowering your workforce to make swift and smart business purchases.
What is spend management software?
Spend management software broadly refers to a suite of solutions that helps companies track expenses, monitor vendor transactions, set budgets, and automate accounting processes. While the capabilities and features of the most popular spend management solutions vary, the majority offer some combination of payroll management, expense management, corporate credit cards, and bill tracking. More advanced tools can also include procurement and supplier management functions.
Top 8 spend management software
Understanding the nuances of specific spend management software solutions can become confusing, particularly as the space becomes more crowded. The list below includes some of the most widely used and well-regarded tools, together with best-fit suggestions.
Rippling
Rippling is an all-in-one platform for HR, IT, and finance, Rippling built upon your employee data as its single source of truth. This consolidated approach not only allows for in-depth analytics and reporting but enables powerful automations that save both time and costs.
By combining payroll, expense management, corporate credit cards, and bill payment in a single system, Rippling gives you complete visibility over all your company spend, along with insights into the specifics of your spending activity. With Rippling, you can review employee expenses, payroll, purchasing, bill payments, and headcount costs together, with the option to drill down into the particulars of reimbursements and approvals.
Key features of Rippling Spend:
- Automated custom approval chains route expenses to the correct approvers based on your business’ requirements.
- Automated expense management tasks, including duplicate detection, general ledger syncing, and receipt matching
- Payroll, expense reporting, and reimbursement in over 100 currencies, along with automatic conversion of expenses into local currencies
- Analytics and reporting tools that provide managers and decision-makers with actionable insights into business spend
- Corporate credit cards that use unique attributes and custom policies to apply an unprecedented degree of control over employee spending
- Centralized invoice tracking and payment that supports payment in local currency to international vendors
Best for: Startups through enterprise
Expensify
Expensify is an expense management app designed to simplify the process of managing expense reports, invoices, and receipts. It focuses on tracking how and where your employees make purchases and centralizing the related documentation.
Key features of Expensify:
- One-click receipt scanning eliminates the need for manual data entry
- Global reimbursement in local currency
- Expensify Visa corporate credit card offers 2% cash back
- Integrates with popular account, travel, and HR tools
Best for: Startups, small and mid-sized businesses
Brex
Brex combines expense tracking, corporate cards, and accounting workflows in a single platform to streamline the reconciliation and reporting process. Features like customizable expense policies, receipt capture, and accounting integrations help businesses monitor spend..
Key features of Brex:
- Automated accounts payable processes with invoice management
- Corporate credit cards available in 40 currencies
- Business checking, treasury, and vault accounts with up to 4.91% yield
- Automated expense review and expense reporting with AI support
Best for: Startups, mid-sized businesses
Ramp
Another popular spend management platform, Ramp specializes in accounts payable automations, corporate credit cards, expense reporting, and accounting integrations. Ramp stands out from similar spend management products for its vendor insights, which can help with strategic sourcing.
Key features of Ramp:
- AI-powered savings insights to help prevent overspending and identify cost-reduction opportunities
- Automated accounts payable processing with invoice extraction, approval workflows, and payment
- Unlimited physical and virtual corporate credit cards with auto-enforced spending policies
Best for: Small and mid-sized businesses
Coupa
Coupa offers large enterprises and mid-sized businesses a comprehensive spend management and procurement solution capable of handling expense management, invoicing, and payments. It’s particularly well-suited to businesses using a procure-to-pay system.
Key features of Coupa:
- Integrates with popular accounting and ERP software
- Powerful vendor management capabilities to streamline the procurement process and strengthen supplier management
- Automated accounts payable for invoice processing and expenses
- Centralized request and approval management
Best for: Enterprise and mid-sized businesses using procurement software
BILL
Formerly known as Divvy, BILL Spend & Expense is an expense management app with features designed to curb employee spending and keep businesses within budget. With BILL, businesses benefit from customizable spend controls that govern physical and virtual corporate cards, as well as automated expense categorization that flags potentially out-of-bounds charges.
Key features of BILL:
- Automated receipt matching and expense categorization for immediate reconciliation
- Virtual corporate credit cards with custom spend policy controls
- Easy to use, intuitive mobile app
Best for: Small and mid-sized businesses
Airbase
Airbase offers a guided procurement platform with spend management features to help businesses monitor expenditures and automate the procure-to-pay process. Other features include an automated accounts management process, corporate cards, and vendor management.
Key features of Airbase:
- Rule creation for customizable spend policies
- Global payments in over 45 countries
- Integrates with accounting, HRIS, and ERP software systems
- Automated expense reporting and approval workflows
Best for: Large and mid-market enterprises
Workday Spend Management
Cloud-based spend management tool Workday specializes in streamlining the procurement process with strategic sourcing, supplier management, invoice processing, and automated accounts payable features. Workday also claims powerful reporting and analytics, including custom dashboards to track and manage expenses.
Key features of Workday Spend Management:
- Intuitive user interface
- Supplier contract management tools add efficiency in the procure to pay process
- Integrates with popular procurement tools like VNDLY
- Custom spending policy controls and audit trails for accurate financial reporting
Best for: Large and mid-market enterprises
How to choose the best spend management software? 4 Key features
When choosing a spend management software, you’ll want to think carefully about your expense management needs, as well as the particular characteristics of your business. There’s no one-size-fits-all software solution, but the following features can benefit almost any organization.
Customizable approval payment workflows
Most company spending policies require different levels of approval for particular roles or types of purchases. New printer cartridges may require signoff only from a direct manager, while a hotel overnight needs approval from a manager and a member of the finance team. An effective spend management tool will automatically route approval requests to the right team members based on your company’s specific spending policy to enhance overall efficiency.
Easy and quick user experience
An expense management solution with a steep learning curve can cost your HR and finance departments as much time and effort as analog bookkeeping systems or complicated spreadsheets. And while some organizations need multiple functions and features in a single tool, others may only need one or two.
Look for spend management software that offers an intuitive interface, easy onboarding, and comprehensive support to ensure a quick startup and smooth resolution of any issues once you're up and running.
Integrations with accounting software
A spend management tool that integrates natively with your accounting software helps keep your finance team up-to-date on your business’ overall inflows and outflows in real-time. Automatic syncing and reconciliation also streamline reporting processes, saving you valuable time at the end of the month.
Likewise, if your business uses separate tools to handle corporate credit cards and reimbursements, you’ll need a spend management tool that can integrate with both.
Analytics and reporting options
Understanding how much your business spends is one piece of the puzzle, but effective spend management requires a more granular understanding of where, how, and why expenses arise. A tool that offers customized reporting and analytics can help you identify trends in spending behavior and prepare accurate forecasts.
Rippling: Consolidate, automate, and control your business spend
Rippling Spend streamlines your spend management by combining the four major categories into a single source system.
- Expense management. Custom workflows simplify the process of reconciling and approving expenses, no matter how sophisticated your policies.
- Corporate credit cards. Card groups with custom attributes ensure that the right employees can access the right funds when needed. At the same time, spend analytics give decision-makers visibility on their reports’ activity.
- Bill pay. Automatically track and pay bills for essential services with automated invoice routing to approvers and direct syncing with your accounting software.
- Payroll. Visualize your global payroll spend in a single currency.
As an all-in-one HR, IT, and finance solution, Rippling also allows you to leverage employee data across functions to automate spend management tasks. Once an employee completes the onboarding workflow in Rippling’s human resources information system (HRIS), for example, you can opt to automatically issue a new corporate credit card.
FAQs on spend management software
What are the benefits of using spend management software?
The benefits of spending management software include cost savings, enhanced visibility of employee expenditures, and efficiency in the reconciliation and reimbursement process. By providing an accurate, up-to-date view of your business’ inflows and outflows, spend management software empowers you to make data-driven decisions about where to allocate your resources and implement policies to prevent overspending.
What is the difference between spend management and expense management?
Spend management and expense management are related but separate concepts. While spend management tracks your organization’s overall financial inputs and outputs, expense management focuses on reimbursements for employee’s business-related purchases. In that sense, expense management is part of your overall spend management, but it’s not the whole story.
What is the best spending tracker?
The best spending tracker is one that offers comprehensive reporting and analytics, automated approval workflows, and comprehensive insight into your organization’s overall financial health and performance.
This blog is based on information available to Rippling as of August 8, 2024.
Disclaimer: Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.
