For most businesses, expense management has always been an area of concern. Good expense management tools do most of the heavy lifting for you by automating the predictable tasks. They take care of the entire expense management process–right from recording expenses to processing reimbursement claims, and generating expense reports.
What is Expense Management?
Expense management refers to the systems deployed by a business to process, pay, and audit employee-initiated expenses. These costs include, but are not limited to, expenses incurred for travel and entertainment.
What and Why an Expense Management Software Solution?
Expense management software refers to systems that process, pay, and audit employee-initiated expenses, such as business calls, flights, car rental, lodging, laundry, and shipping of work-related items. This type of software shares some similarities with spend management—which plans and monitors procurement expenses such as raw materials, business services, or investments.
The Expense management system you pick should have an internal approval system that can accommodate your approval hierarchy.
Top 5 Expense Management Software to Look Out For in 2023
Here are some of the best expense management solutions:
1. Happay
Happay offers a complete ecosystem on a single platform, ensuring that your travel and expense management is entirely streamlined.
Apart from travel and expenses, Happay offers solutions for petty cash management, invoice payments, corporate payments, and corporate cards. The platform’s end-to-end integration, security, complete visibility, and control allow you to manage multiple workflows on a single platform.
With 7000+ customers and over 4 million users across 40+ verticals, Happay offers a full stack- travel, expense, and payment for enterprises.
Suitable for: Complete travel and expense management for medium and large enterprises.
Pricing: Contact Happay for pricing information
2. Expensify
Expensify is a web-based expense management solution to manage your expenses in real-time. You can easily scan your receipts, generate and submit expense reports. The system also has an automatic reimbursement system to send the approved amount directly to employees’ bank accounts. It is tightly integrated with accounting software like QuickBooks online, Oracle, Sage, and Xero.
Suitable for: From expense tracking for sole-proprietors to reporting and reimbursements for enterprises, Expensify has a plan for everyone.
Pricing: The basic plan starts at $5/month for SMBs.
3. Zoho Expense
Zoho Expense is one of the most granular expense management software where you can provide role-based access to employees. It accommodates your approval hierarchy and expense policies and offers plenty of room for customization.
The mobile app comes in handy for both approvers and submitters. It’s also connected to the Zoho Finance Suite to post automatic journal entries to makes the lives of the finance team a little easier.
Suitable for: SMBs and Enterprises
Pricing: There’s a freemium plan for 3 users for just one automated workflow. The premium plan priced at $2.5/user billed annually comes with a minimum of 10 users and 25 automated workflows.
4. Concur
Concur is a travel and expense management software that lets you take control of every aspect of corporate expense management with a connected, end-to-end solution. Their slick mobile app lets you enforce travel policies and gives you total control over travel expenses.
Suitable for: SMBs and Enterprises
Pricing: The small business plan for 25 users starts at $8/user/month
5. Certify
Certify is an easy-to-use, web-based expense management software that comes with in-built travel management abilities. With mobile receipt capture, automated expense report creation, streamlined process, and workflow. Certify eliminates the need for spreadsheets and paper receipts.
Suitable for: SMBs and Enterprises
Pricing: The basic plan for small and medium businesses for 25 users starts at $8/user/month and the enterprises’ price plan differs with the needs of the organization.
6. Fyle
Fyle is a new-age expense management software for both, on-the-go employees and productive finance teams. With automated card reconciliations, rich data extraction from any paper or digital receipt in Gmail/Outlook inbox, Slack and WhatsApp, and real-time dashboard and analytics for all employee spends, Fyle is everyone’s long due expense dream come true.
Suitable for: Companies with 100 to 5000 employees
Pricing: Fyle bills only for active users, i.e., users who create at least one expense report in a month. The popular Business plan for fast-growing companies is at $8.99 per active user/month when billed annually.
Must-Have Features to Look for in an Expense Management Platform
Every business has unique requirements when it comes to expense management. However, here are some important features almost every business needs.
1. Mobile App
When your salespeople are out there closing deals, it can be frustrating for them to save the receipts for food and travel. It’s crucial to make expense tracking as easy as possible so that requesting reimbursements doesn’t become a full-time job.
A mobile app comes in handy so employees can submit expenses even when they’re on the move.
2. Expense Approval Hierarchy
The expense approval system should accommodate your approval hierarchy and at the same time be flexible enough to let you modify it whenever needed. This is so that, when employees submit their expenses, they should automatically reach the next person in the hierarchy.
3. Corporate Credit Cards
The system should let you add credit cards so that any transaction can be automatically fetched from the credit card statement. This makes it easy for the accounting team during reconciliations.
4. Multi-Currency Expensing
When employees make international trips, the expenses are going to be in a different currency from your own. The expense management tool must be able to record transactions in foreign currencies and convert them to the local currency for accounting purposes.
5. Eliminate Double Entries
Your expense management tool should have integration options with other tools. When you connect your expense reporting system with other systems like accounting software, you can avoid manually entering the same data twice. This not only saves you time but also eliminates human errors.
6. Online Reimbursements
When the finance team approves a claim, you can expedite the reimbursement process by setting up an ACH payment or a direct bank transfer and sending the money directly to the employee’s bank account.
7. Advanced Reporting
The system should give you complete visibility into your spend, and insights into cutting back on expenses. You can analyze employees’ expenses during business trips, identify policy violations, and avoid unnecessary expenses.
