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The Top 10 Expense Management Solutions

Discover the Top Expense Management Solutions designed to streamline financial processes for organizations. Explore features such as intuitive expense tracking, receipt management, and reimbursement.

Last updated on Jun 26, 2024

Written by Caitlin Jones

Technical review by Laura Iannini

The Top 10 Expense Management Solutions include:

1. Brex Expense Management
2. Coupa Expense
3. Emburse
4. Expensify
5. Navan Expense Management
6. Ramp Expense Management
7. SAP Concur Expense
8. Webexpenses Expense Management
9. Xero
10. Zoho Expense

Expense management solutions enable businesses to easily track and manage their company expenses, including travel, entertainment, procurement, and operating expenses. Expense management solutions work by digitizing and automating the complex process of expense tracking, validation, reimbursement, and reporting. They allow employees to quickly capture and submit expenses; managers to review and approve the expenses; and finance teams to process reimbursements and maintain detailed, accurate records for auditing and budgeting purposes.

For the end user, this means less time spent logging their expenses, faster reimbursement times, and less back-and-forth with the finance department. For the finance team, it means less manual work, reduced errors, ensured compliance, and a wealth of data to help with financial planning and reporting.

In this article, we’ll explore the top expense management solutions designed to help you streamline your organization’s expense tracking, validation, reimbursement, and reporting processes. We’ll highlight the key use cases and features of each solution, including receipt digitization, policy enforcement, approval workflow automation, real-time analytics, and integrations with accounting and HR systems.

Brex Expense Management

Brex Expense Management provides comprehensive control over business expense processes. The software uses AI and automation to help implement and enforce custom controls for all business expenses, as well as providing actionable insights through real-time expenditure and budget reports.

Brex Expense Management automates expense reviews and document collection. Using OCR technology, Level 3 payment data, and real-time integrations, Brex automatically populates memos, attendees, and expense categories, significantly decreasing manual data entry and increasing efficiency.

Additionally, Brex Assistant, a virtual employee aid, automates various tasks and facilitates real-time responses to queries and concerns related to expense management. The product also incorporates a range of benefits to enhance the overall user experience and operational efficiency. Live budgets allow for accountability and tracking of departmental spending in real time, while seamless integration with popular ERPs such as QuickBooks and NetSuite simplify the closing of books. Other benefits include fast, limitless global reimbursements, local spend management across multiple locations, and the support of multiple languages and currencies.

Overall, its focus on streamlining expense tasks and facilitating real-time insights on spend management makes Brex Expense Management a comprehensive solution for businesses seeking enhanced control over their expenses.

Coupa Expense

Coupa Expense is an all-encompassing expense management software, designed to enhance value and reduce manual work. The software captures all travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses, helping organizations control costs and minimize spend leakages.

Coupa Expense’s sophisticated OCR technology and seamless integrations automatically input data into expense reports. The software can import expense line items and receipts from various sources, bolstering accuracy and accelerating expense report creation. Coupa also integrates travel spending with the rest of the business expenses, providing an early insight into travel expenditures.

Additionally, it offers a handy mobile feature, SmarterTrip, which uses geolocation to streamline mileage tracking and receipt capture. Coupa Expense also features intelligent audit algorithms that score every expense report to combat fraud and control travel-expense spending. It effectively manages VAT, global per diems, and receipt digitization to comply with complex global requirements. For employee reimbursements, the solution eliminates dependency on payroll cycles by facilitating reimbursements directly within the platform and integrating with your banks.

Coupa Expense provides full visibility into T&E spending, offering insights into program performance and identifying savings opportunities. Overall, Coupa Expense can help your organization streamline its expense management processes and identify cost-saving opportunities.

Emburse

Emburse helps businesses to simplify expense management by promoting transparency for financial departments, facilitating seamless control over employee spending, and simplifying approvals processes—all while ensuring compliance. The platform allows for easy creation, submission, and approval of expenses from any device at any time and location. Its capabilities extend to the issuance of virtual or physical cards for tracking and controlling business expenditure.

Emburse ensures swift, secure reimbursements for all employee expenses. It utilizes OCR technology to accurately extract important details from receipts, thereby eliminating errors caused by manual data entry. It supports adaptable expense policies to maintain compliance with internal policies for business and travel expenses, whilst providing analytics and reporting capabilities that make it easier for finance teams to generate expense reports and predict future spending.

Finally, Emburse helps businesses reconcile credit card transactions. Emburse is a well-rounded solution for organizations needing powerful automation to streamline their expense management processes.

Expensify

Expensify is an expense management application that offers tools for receipt scanning, customizable workflows, credit card importation, and corporate card reconciliation. Whether servicing small start-ups or established Fortune 500 companies, it provides a versatile platform for handling financial processes.

One of Expensify’s key features is its one-click receipt scanner, known as SmartScan, which automatically converts meal, travel, or office expense receipts into digital data. The tool also provides a function to import and code personal and business card transactions, eliminating manual input. Expensify also offers its own commercial card. Both company-preferred corporate cards and the Expensify Card can be reconciled within the app. From an administrative point of view, financial teams can configure and structure complex approval workflows within the platform to ensure compliance with their company’s specific review protocols. Teams can also monitor spending trends through the platform’s reporting interface and generate custom business expense reports to aid in financial decision-making processes. In addition to these capabilities, Expensify offers multi-level general ledger coding, advanced tax tracking, compliance functionalities, and delegated access for team collaboration. The platform also offers integrations with popular HR and accounting systems, helping streamline tax season procedures and simplify audits. When it comes to security, Expensify is equipped with PCI-compliant security protocols to guard against data breaches.

Overall, Expensify delivers a balanced blend of robust tools to help businesses better manage their expenses by optimizing procedures and saving time.

Navan Expense Management

Navan Expense Management is a solution that automates the entire expense management process, from the point of sale to reconciliation. Navan enables organizations to track and monitor business expenses in one centralized location, delivering spending insights in real-time to help create expense reports and plan for future spending.

Navan helps organizations control company spending by proactively enforcing spending rules at the point of purchase. The technology automatically categorizes and reconciles transaction details upon every card swipe, thus eliminating the need for traditional expense reports. When it comes to card management, Navan offers multiple options, with support for a variety of countries and currencies. Virtual cards are made available for each travel booking through Navan, minimizing the need for manual reconciliation. The platform also enables finance teams to issue virtual and physical cards to cater to recurring or on-the-go expenditures. Finally, users can link their existing Visa or Mastercard to the Navan platform, maintaining their current card benefits.

Navan also offers real-time reporting capabilities that provide visibility into every dollar spent and provide a consolidated view of global expenses across all cards and reimbursements. These functions enable businesses to reduce expense leakage, optimize expense policies, and improve their forecasting.

Navan Expense Management is a robust tool that makes it easier for businesses to control their spending, reconcile expense reports, and forecast future spending more accurately. Overall, we recommend this platform as a strong solution for any business looking to streamline their expense management.

Ramp Expense Management

Ramp Expense Management is an automated expense management platform that offers corporate card control, employee reimbursement, budgeting, and reporting capabilities. The software operates on real-time data, ensuring a thorough view of company spending for informed decision-making.

With Ramp Expense Management, finance teams can build policies directly into employee cards to prevent unauthorized spending. The platform’s budgeting utilities permit employees to request spending from pre-emptive budgets, giving finance teams more control over departmental expenditures. Ramp Expense Management also streamlines the expense reporting process, prompting employees to submit receipts as soon as expenditure occurs. Expense inconsistencies or policy breaches, such as excessive tipping or repeat receipt use, are flagged for review. One of the platform’s key features is its reconciliation and ERP synchronization, which enables it to effectively code, categorize, and map transactions, then sync seamlessly with a company’s ERP for instantaneous updates, accelerating the monthly close procedure. The automated expense system also handles missing item reminders and repayment requests, as well as employing card-locking measures for non-compliant employees.

Ramp Expense Management gives organizations greater visibility and control over their expenses. Real-time spending data and insights enable finance teams to make timely adjustments, preventing budget overruns, while the system’s AI component provides faster, detailed expense analysis, identifying savings opportunities such as duplicate subscriptions or unused services. Overall, Ramp’s solution enables businesses to efficiently manage their expenses, uphold compliance, and improve their spending strategy.

SAP Concur Expense

SAP Concur Expense is an expense management tool that helps business automate and improve the accuracy of their expense reports. It integrates all expense data into one system, offering the ability to track and control spending with a comprehensive view of every transaction detail, regardless of the origin of expenditure.

By integrating Concur Expense, Concur Travel, and Concur Invoice, SAP Concur Expense allows organizations to track and manage not just employee-initiated expenses, but also travel costs and invoice payments. The platform enables finance teams to easily manage the entire process from any device, adding to its accessibility. An additional feature of SAP Concur Expense is its robust partner ecosystem. With your subscription, you gain access to a variety of partner apps and integrations, allowing you to expand and fortify your spending solution.

The platform’s combination of mobile-friendly, cloud-based tools and customization options, alongside its powerful AI-assisted reporting, make it easy to deploy and use for both end users and finance teams.

Overall, SAP Concur Expense enables businesses to effectively manage company spending and improve policy compliance.

Webexpenses Expense Management

Webexpenses Expense Management is designed to optimize business financial processes. It facilitates the tracking, submission, and approval of expenses from any location, with the goal of giving businesses better control and predictability over their finances and expenditure.

Webexpenses Expense Management streamlines expense processes, helping to maximize time and reduce costs. The platform offers effortless receipt capture, categorization, and reporting, all of which can be facilitated through a mobile or desktop device. Its Intelligent Receipt Matching feature expedites the expense process by pairing receipts to transactions. Webexpenses also offers a built-in feature for automated policy checks, helping to reduce manual oversight and ensure compliance with internal policies and industry regulations. The platform also allows for the easy integration with over 50+ accounting systems and offers encrypted cloud reliability for non-stop business operations.

Overall, Webexpenses Expense Management provides businesses with precise control over expenses, helping them to efficiently manage all expenditure from mileage tracking to petty cash management. In addition, the 24/6 support team is always ready to assist, making the platform well-suited to smaller organizations that may need a little more support, as well as larger enterprises.

Xero

Xero is an accounting software designed to streamline financial management for businesses. The software provides secure cloud accounting capabilities, allowing businesses to consolidate their finances systematically. In Xero’s “Established” plan, it offers a comprehensive suite of expense management tools. These include detailed trend analysis and customizable reports to empower confident business decision-making, as well as powerful automations that help streamline expense management processes—from bank transaction reconciliation to sending invoice reminders.

Through the Xero Me app, Xero quickly captures expenses, record mileage, and process expense claims directly from a user’s mobile device. The app’s photo receipt scanning functionality auto-fills claims, significantly reducing manual input, and businesses can also track and record mileage for accurate claim submission.

Xero also provides detailed reports and real-time analytics to help businesses track expenses, manage cash flow, and plan future expenditures. The platform allows finance teams to group and organize expenses and allocate them to specific customers or projects.

Xero provides secure, centralized accounting, support for confident financial decision-making, and powerful automations that save time. The platform enables users to submit paperless expense claims quickly, whilst also providing robust analytics for expense management. Overall, Xero’s comprehensive feature set offers businesses enterprise-level accounting and expense management at an approachable price point.

Zoho Expense

Zoho Expense is a comprehensive solution designed to streamline and simplify expense reporting operations, with a focus on travel expenses. The platform offers efficient expense reporting mechanisms and effective expenditure control, all in compliance with business policies.

Zoho Expense can be used to control expenditure through its budget setting and purchase approval features. The platform also offers expense reporting automation, which eliminates manual expense reporting by streamlining the process right from receipt generation to reimbursement. It allows users to automatically generate expenses from scanned receipts and conduct reimbursements and settlements online. It also enables credit and corporate card reconciliation and direct deposit for reimbursements. Zoho Expense provides an expansive range of analytic reports on various aspects like cards, travel, spending, and reimbursement. To further tighten financial control, the tool has an AI-based fraud detection engine that helps businesses audit their expenses and ensure compliance with local spending policies.

Zoho Expense offers a set of capabilities specifically designed for managing travel expenses. The platform facilitates every aspect of business travel from fare bookings and visa requests to flight alerts, directly within the platform. Admins can set up multi-level pre-travel approval flows and automate visa documentation processes. The platform offers a self-booking feature that can be used to manage various phases of business trips.

Everything You Need To Know About Expense Management Solutions (FAQs)

What Are Expense Management Solutions?

When your employees spend their own money on something for the business—such as a train ride, a team-building activity, internet bills, or a new headset—you need to reimburse them and make sure those expenses are valid, accounted for, and controlled. Traditional methods of tracking expenses, such as paper-based invoicing and spreadsheets, relied on the employee submit their expense report by manually logging receipt details and the reason for the expense. An admin would then go through all submitted reports and check the paper receipts and approve or reject the expenses. This required lots of manual data entry, opening the door to human error. On top of that, these methods are difficult and costly to manage at scale.

Expense management solutions use automation to help streamline the expense management process. They help employees submit and track their expenses, and make it easier for admins to review expenses, reimburse employees, and create expense reports. This helps reduce the risk of error, minimize labor costs, increase visibility into company spending, and reimburse employees more promptly—all whilst ensuring compliance with data privacy standards and internal expense policies.

How Do Expense Management Solutions Work?

Expense management solutions automate the entire lifecycle of employee expenses, including recording, tracking, approval, and payment. While this can vary a little between solutions, it usually looks something like this:

The employee pays for a business expense using their own money.
The employee records the expense in the expense management solution’s mobile app, usually by uploading a picture of the receipt; the solution uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract the details of the expense without the employee having to enter them manually.
The employee logs the expense claim, or several expense claims, in an expense report and submits it.
The expense management solution automatically notifies the relevant approver of the report, so they can view it and approve or reject the claim.
If the report is approved, it’s forwarded to the finance team, who use receipt matching to validate it for compliance and authenticity.
The approved claim is reimbursed either immediately or in the employee’s next pay packet, according to company policy.

Behind the scenes, admins can configure expense management policies to ensure that the business handles expenses in line with necessary compliance requirements, and to eliminate the risk of overspending.

What Are The Benefits Of Expense Management Solutions?

Expense management solutions offer several benefits. Firstly, they make it easier and quicker to process expenses, both from the end user’s perspective and that of the finance team. They can extract details from and verify receipts automatically, notify teams whenever an expense needs to be reviewed, and produce expense reports in seconds.

Secondly, they vastly reduce the number of mistakes made in the expense management process by eliminating the need for manual data input. Some tools also offer anomaly detection, helping teams to identify issues in their expense reports and get to the bottom of them more quickly, without having to track back through all their receipts manually.

And finally, by streamlining administrative tasks and offering powerful reporting capabilities, they enable finance teams to spend more time on strategic planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Most modern expense management solutions track expense claims and analyze them to identify spending patterns. This can help finance teams to accurately predict future spending, allocate budget, and make adjustments quickly if spending strays from their plan. Some solutions even use this analysis to give recommendations on how to optimize expense management policies, which can help save time and money in the long term.

What Features Should You Look For In An Expense Management Solution?

A good expense management solution can help you streamline your financial processes and ensure accurate record-keeping, so it’s important that you choose the right one for your business. To help you do that, here are the top features you should look out for when comparing expense management solutions:

User-friendly interface: An intuitive design and ease of use are essential for user adoption because they reduce the learning curve and encourage employees to use the system consistently. As part of this, you should look for mobile accessibility, which will enable employees to submit expenses on the go, capturing receipts and information in real-time.
Receipt capture and OCR technology: Your solution should capture receipts digitally and use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to extract relevant information. This automates data entry and improves accuracy.
Credit card integration: Integration with corporate credit cards allows for seamless expense tracking, reduces manual data entry, and ensures accurate reconciliation.
Multi-currency support: If your business operates globally, the expense management solution should support multiple currencies for more accurate tracking and reporting.
Policy compliance: You should be able to create custom policies to ensure that expenses align with company guidelines and regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of non-compliance. Once you’ve created these policies, the solution should enforce them automatically.
Approval workflows: You should be able to configure approval workflows to enable efficient processing and ensure that expenses are reviewed by the appropriate personnel before reimbursement.
Real-time reporting and analytics: Comprehensive reporting tools provide insights into spending patterns, helping you make informed decisions and identify areas for cost savings.
Audit trail and compliance tracking: A robust audit trail feature can help you track changes and provides transparency; this is crucial for compliance and internal audits.
Automation and integration: Your solution should automate expense submission, approval workflows, and report generation to help save time and reduce manual errors. It should also integrate with other business software you’re using, such as accounting and ERP systems, to ensure seamless data flow and eliminate the need for duplicate entries.
Data security: Look out for built-in security measures, such as encryption and secure data storage, that can help you protect sensitive financial information and maintain compliance with data protection regulations.

Caitlin Jones

Deputy Head Of Content

Caitlin Jones is Deputy Head of Content at Expert Insights. Caitlin is an experienced writer and journalist, with years of experience producing award-winning technical training materials and journalistic content. Caitlin holds a First Class BA in English Literature and German, and provides our content team with strategic editorial guidance as well as carrying out detailed research to create articles that are accurate, engaging and relevant. Caitlin co-hosts the Expert Insights Podcast, where she interviews world-leading B2B tech experts.

Laura Iannini

Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.