The Top 10 Accounts Payable Solutions

Airbase is a spend management solution that makes it easier for organizations to automate their accounts payable, software-enabled corporate cards and employee expense reimbursements via a single platform. Airbase is designed to help accounting teams better manage their business’ spending to gain deeper insights into their cash flow and reduce wasted spend.

Airbase automates payment transactions by implementing workflows and approval routing processes. The platform automatically codes, tags and records transactions in the general ledger so teams don’t have to do it manually, mitigating the risk of human error. The Invoice Inbox feature ensures that all invoice data is filed in one location, automatically pulling in data from other sources such as email correspondence to save teams time spent looking for specific details. Airbase supports payments via ACH, card, check, vendor credit and international wire, providing one platform for tracking different payment types. Airbase also generates real-time reports to help teams stay on top of their cash flow, including banking activity reports that show individual transactions for easier month-end reconciliation. Finally, vendors can log into the Airbase Vendor Portal to input their company and bank details and track their own payments.

Airbase integrates natively with QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct and NetSuite, making it easier for businesses to keep track of what they’re paying via one portal. It also supports domestic and international payments—meaning payments can be made in USD or the vendor’s local currency—and making it a popular option for businesses with a large percentage of suppliers that are based abroad. We recommend Airbase to SMBs looking for a user-friendly, intuitive platform to help them automate their non-payroll spending, so they can spend less time on administration and more time helping the business grow.

Bill.com is an accounting automation and digitization software provider that helps small- to midsized businesses simplify their financial processes. Their solution automates invoice processing and the processes of sending and receiving payments, as well as syncing with popular accounting systems to provide deeper insights into a company’s financial operations. It also offers deep insights into workflows and cash flows, to help businesses better manage their spending.

Bill.com enables accounting teams to import invoices manually or via CVS templates or email to reduce the amount of manual data entry they have to carry out. The platform encrypts this data and syncs it between Bill.com and any existing accounting software or financial process tools, including FreshBooks, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and QuickBooks. This makes it easy for teams to reconcile their accounts and create one holistic overview of their AP processes, without having to manually enter data multiple times. Bill.com supports payment via ACH, virtual cards and international wire transfers, simplifying international payments in multiple currencies. Finally, all payment-related activities are automatically recorded, creating a comprehensive audit trail for compliance purposes.

Bill.com is a cloud-based solution, making it simple to deploy and highly scalable, enabling the platform to grow to support your business growth. The fact that all documents are hosted in one cloud location also makes it easy for authorized team members to access any information they need from any location, on any device. Because of this, we recommend Bill.com as a strong solution for SMBs looking to automate their accounts payable and manage their cash flow remotely.

FreshBooks is an accounting software solution designed to help small businesses keep track of their finances. As well as accounts payable tools, FreshBooks offers invoicing automation and template creation, time tracking and robust reporting features. They also offer a mobile app, which enables accounting teams to take care of their payments from anywhere, on any device.

FreshBooks’ cloud-hosted platform makes it easy for teams to track their expenses in line with their budget. The solution automatically imports expenses—including multi-currency expenses—from synced bank accounts every day, so that teams are always working with the most current data. In addition to this, authorized persons can upload receipt images and add them to expenses. From the central dashboard, teams can easily access useful reports such as profit and loss, VAT returns and sales tax summaries. Reports can be filtered by client, team member or date, and saved, exported or printed for ease of sharing. This robust functionality makes it much easier for teams to keep on top of auditing and compliance requirements, including MTD for VAT.

As well as enabling internal accounting teams to take control of their business’ finances, FreshBooks enables admins to set permissions for contractors and external accountants to access data if needed. FreshBooks offers webinar Q&As, as well as telephone support from 8am-8pm EST, and takes pride in connecting every support call to a human representative rather than an automated system. We recommend FreshBooks as an intuitive accounts payable solution for SMBs looking to simplify their payment processes and make better financial decisions.

Intuit is a market-leading accounting and finance software provider, specifically for consumer and business use. Their small business offering includes tax form, payroll, time keeping and payment management solutions. QuickBooks is Intuit’s flagship accounting solution, which helps SMBs track their income and expenses to manage their cash flow. QuickBooks is available in four plans: Simple Start, Essentials, Plus and Advanced.

QuickBooks helps accounting teams keep track of their accounts payable via one central dashboard. Teams can make payments directly through QuickBooks via bank transfer, debit/credit card, or paper check, or schedule payments in advance. All transactions are synced with existing bank accounts and payment gateways, such as PayPal, and automatically recorded for ease of auditing. Teams can also postpone payments to adjust their cash reserves. With QuickBooks Advanced, teams can leverage integrated analytics tools from Fathom to track KPIs and make better financial decisions to encourage business growth. These analyses can be exported as visual reports. The Advanced plan also offers workflow automation, which enables teams to schedule payment reminders to ensure they don’t default. It also offers security features; role-based access controls ensure only authorized personnel can access sensitive financial data, and continuous backups enable teams to restore financial data to a specific date and time in the event of data loss, or quickly roll back changes to undo mistakes.

Customers praise QuickBooks for its user-friendly interface and useful API integrations. We recommend QuickBooks Advanced as a strong option for mid-sized businesses looking to better manage their payments and improve their strategic financial decision making. For smaller businesses on a tighter budget looking for a reliable, easy-to-use account payable solution, we recommend the Essentials package.

Oracle is a cloud infrastructure services, database software and cloud applications provider, with solutions ranging from resource and performance management to supply chain management, advertising and customer experience. The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Accounts Payable platform is Oracle’s accounts payable solution, designed to help businesses manage their cash, balance supplier needs and improve their relationships with their suppliers.

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne automatically calculates the tax, discounts and currency conversions on accounts payable to ensure payments are made accurately and on time, while enabling businesses to leverage vendor discounts and offers banks may have on multi-currency transactions. The platform supports electronic funds transfers (EFTs), drafts and paper checks, including transactions in multiple currencies and languages. While the accounting team can handle payment requests, suppliers themselves can also log into the system to review their own vouchers and payment information, improving transparency and accuracy.  JD Edwards EnterpriseOne also automatically scans for duplicates invoices and notifies accounting managers via preliminary warnings and elevated alerts, helping to prevent duplicate payments.

As well as streamlining accounts payable processes, businesses can leverage the platform’s UX One Accounts Payable Manager to analyze invoice processing and suggest improvements to the cash management strategy to make process run more efficiently. We recommend Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Accounts Payable platform as a strong solution for mid to large organizations with a dedicated accounting team, looking to automate their accounts payable processes, improve their cash flow and strengthen supplier relationships via timely, collaborative payment options.

Sage is a financial software provider specializing in accounting, payroll and HR solutions for SMBs and accountants. Sage Intacct is their holistic, cloud-based finance software solution designed to help small businesses monitor and manage their financial transactions—including their accounts payable. Because of its robust feature set, Sage Intacct has ranked highly as an SMB solution for five consecutive years in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large, and Global Enterprises report.

With Sage Intacct’s “point-and-click” workflow controls, accounting teams can easily define custom workflows and approvals to make their processes run as efficiently as possible. This automation ensures that all accounts are paid to the right vendors, at the right time, while greatly reducing the need for manual data input. Sage Intacct also offers robust reporting functionality; teams can generate reports into liabilities, vendor-ageing, and bill and check registers in real-time for continuous visibility into the state of their business’ finances.

Delivered in the cloud, Sage Intacct offers scalability and flexibility to meet the needs of a growing business. Additionally, it integrates via API with external data processing and financial applications such as Salesforce, to help save time spent reconciling data and increase productivity. We recommend Sage Intacct for small businesses looking for user-friendly and simple accounts payable software that will give them greater visibility and help make their accounts payable workflows more efficient.

SAP is a global leading provider of business process management software, including HR, finance, CRM, business technology and supply chain solutions. SAP Concur is their suite of expense and invoice management tools, which includes SAP Concur Invoice. Concur Invoice digitizes and automates all end-to-end process and workflows, helping SMBs to increase visibility into their financials and make their cash flows more efficient. And with SAP Concur’s mobile app, accounting teams can do this from anywhere, at any time.

Concur Invoice automates workflows to reduce the need for manual data entry, helping to make AP transactions run more efficiently and with fewer errors. The solution also offers automatic two- and three-way invoice matching, which ensures that purchase orders, invoices and receipts are in line to prevent duplicate payments. Accounting teams can generate or schedule out-of-the-box and custom reports into their accounts payable data to help them monitor trends and better manage their spending. Finally, Concur Invoice also offers a web- and mobile-based app for processing supplier invoices, enabling accounting teams to access data whenever they need it, wherever they need it, from authorized accounts.

SAP Concur Invoice integrates seamlessly with existing ERP and accounting systems such as NetSuite for easy data reconciliation, as well as with a range of payment providers to streamline the vendor payment process. We recommend SAP Concur Invoice as a strong invoice processing and accounts payable solution for small- to mid-sized organizations looking for a way to automate their AP processes and access their accounts payable securely on the go.

Spendesk is an accounting solution dedicated to helping organizations manage their spending, including expense reimbursements, invoice management, and company card management. Their accounts payable automation and invoice processing functionality make it easy for SMBs to process, approve and pay invoices, streamlining tedious manual process so that accounting teams can focus on making strategic financial decisions to encourage growth.

With Spendesk, all trusted employees can remotely upload invoices and receipts to one central platform for the accounting team to process, eliminating the risk of documents going missing and reducing email comms. Spendesk leverages optical character recognition (OCR) technology to check the legitimacy of each receipt. Then, once they’ve approved an invoice, accounting staff can export AP files to synced online banking portals, ensuring all invoices are paid accurately and on time. This also supports the payment of multiple invoices at once. Spendesk records all approvals and payments, creating a comprehensive audit log of all financial transactions. As well as making one-time payments, accounting teams can view their subscriptions from the central dashboard and cancel any unused SaaS services they’re still paying for.

Spendesk is praised by SMBs for its intuitive interface and the ease with which they can track their spending. We recommend their solution for small- to mid-size businesses looking to automate their accounts payable processes, as well as reduce the strain on their accounting team by enabling staff to upload their own invoices and receipts for processing.

Stampli is a market-leading accounts payable and invoice management solution. Designed to reduce the burden on accounting teams and improve AP workflows, Stampli also offers vendor collaboration, OCR and reporting tools. Stampli is quick and easy to deploy, with support from their technical team, and can be used on-site or remotely, via any device, so that organizations can keep on top of their payments no matter where their team is based.

Stampli automates invoice capture and coding with advanced AI algorithms that learn a business’ workflows automatically. From the Collaboration Hub, accounting teams can centrally view, send and track invoices directly. Stampli also supports supplier relationships by enabling direct vendor communications within the Hub. All invoice-related activities and conversations are logged automatically so that accounting teams can quickly and easily access a comprehensive audit trail for auditing and compliance purposes. Accounting teams can use Stampli to generate reports into their expense forecasts and what they need to do to achieve their KPIs, helping them to make better strategic decisions when it comes to increasing profit and company growth. Finally, admins can configure role-based access permissions to mitigate the risk of fraud and protect sensitive financial data.

A cloud-based solution, Stampli integrates seamlessly with a wide range of accounting and ERP systems—including Oracle, Sage Intacct, Intuit QuickBooks and Microsoft Dynamics 365—for simple data reconciliation and to minimize manual data entry. Customers praise the solution for its ease of use, comprehensive invoice tracking and—notably—the responsiveness of the vendor to customer feedback. We recommend Stampli as a strong solution for any organization looking to automate their accounts payable workflows.

Xero is a cloud-based accounting software solution designed to help small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers keep on top of their financial transactions. To do this, it offers a wide set of bookkeeping features, including bill payment, expense claiming, bank reconciliation, accounts receivable, inventory tracking, sales tax calculation and project tracking. Xero is delivered via three plans: Starter, Standard and Premium, targeted at the self-employed, SMBs and enterprises respectively.

From Xero’s central dashboard, accounting teams can easily see which payments are due or waiting approval, make immediate payments and schedule future payments to uphold supplier relationships and avoid defaulting. Xero also supports batch and multi-currency payments, with current exchange rates for over 160 currencies. Teams can generate real-time, custom reports into their spending and budget activity to monitor business performance against KPIs. All reports can be exported as a PDF or spreadsheet, or shared via email to keep key stakeholders in the loop. As well as desktop and web apps, Xero offers a suite of mobile applications for both the accounting team and other employees, making it easy for businesses to track their payments remotely, from any device.

Though Xero is a global solution, it’s most popular in the New Zealand, Australia and UK markets. We recommend Xero’s Standard plan as a strong accounts payable solution for smaller businesses who want to gain better insights into their cash flow and manage their invoices more effectively. For mid-size and larger enterprises looking for the above, but who may work with vendors around the world in multiple currencies, we recommend Xero Premium.