8 BEST Expense Management Software & Tracker Apps (2023)
Barbara Thompson
Enterprises use expense management software to manage, plan, and predict expenses. Most expense management solutions cannot handle complex expense approvals, require manual inputs for functioning, and lack tools for proper forecasting.
Choosing an expense management service with sufficient users to manage your scale is always the best. It would help if you relied on a solution that supports employee card management, budgeting, automation, workflow management, and many integrations. Choosing the best expense management tools can go a long way in helping you manage your business needs.
Our team has meticulously handpicked the eight best software to track expenses easily. The evaluations were based on travel/expense management, budgeting tools, approval workflows, and pricing.
Best Expense Tracking Software: Top Picks!
| Provider | Region/Currency Support | Mobile Apps | Free Trial | Integrated Payments and travel expenses | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ramp | 195 Countries with 40+ Currencies | Android and iOS | Lifetime free Basic Plan | Yes | Learn More |
| Expensify | 58 Currencies | iOS, iPadOS and Android | Free Plan | Yes | Learn More |
| Happay | 150+ Countries | Android and iOS, iPadOS | Lifetime free Basic Plan | Yes | Learn More |
| Rydoo | 19 Countries | iOS, iPadOS, and Android | No | No | Learn More |
| DivvyPay | USD | Android and iOS | Yes, 14 Days | No | Learn More |
1) Ramp
Best for automation in managing expenses
Ramp is among the best expense management software that tracks all small or large business transactions. Its advanced algorithms learn and adapt to your behaviour and categorize all expenses on-the-fly. AI-driven data analytics and insights help minimize wastage and efficiently utilize your resources.
Ramp allows you to create custom policies and rules for managing employee travel expenses. Furthermore, it lets you create complicated logic for setting employee expense limits across each category. You can use it to computerize your daily workflow routines, approvals, and transaction reviews. It has a highly-skilled team of experts to provide you with guidance and advice on any problems you may face.
Features:
- Receipt Matching: Robust AI-powered algorithms can extract data from images of receipts and take action accordingly.
- Autopilot: You can speed up receipt collection by directly fetching important details from 3rd party services such as Lyft, Gmail, and Amazon.
- Login: It has native support for quick logins through SSO from services like Okta, Google, and Azure. You can use it to implement 2 Factor Authentication as well.
- Automation: Wide range of tools for expense approvals, policy implementation, and compliance save your time and reduce the chances of manual errors.
- Digitization: You can digitize your operations, ensuring paperless submissions of invoices from employees and affiliates.
- Onboarding Resources: Provides extensive guidance and training sessions for beginners to get started and familiarise themselves with the platform.
- Data Syncing: It performs real-time data syncing, ensuring all data of vendors, customers, suppliers, and affiliates is up to date.
- Prevent Frauds: Provides extensive Control over cards, ensuring fraud can be detected and prevented immediately.
- Pre-Approve Expenses: You can better support your employees financially by pre-approving certain critical expenses with appropriate limits.
- Compatibility: This service is compatible with various tech stacks, accounts, and banks, ensuring complete coverage across your company.
- Actionable Insights: It provides robust, actionable insights for your business that can drastically improve your financial performance.
- Rules: Allows you to define precise rules for employee expenditure across each category and with multi-level conditionals for receipts and memos.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Lifetime Free Basic Plan
- Price: Contact Customer Support for Pricing
2) Expensify
Best for receipt tracking and management
Expensify is an ideal expense management service that helps manage all aspects of business and optimize costs. Its robust receipt tracking lets you stay updated with your receipts’ status. You can use it to perform in-depth audits, mitigate duplicate tickets, verify transactions, and ensure correct exchange rate utilization.
Expensify keeps your data safe and private by following all modern security standards, including GDPR and compliance with Privacy Shield Standards. You can distribute free Expensify Cards for your entire team and gain various insights. It also has features to help you with accounting, payroll, and taxes.
Features:
- Receipt Scanning: The receipt scanner lets you and your employees click/upload photos of receipts from their devices. Its advanced algorithms extract data from the images and store them in the database.
- Transactions Import: To maintain accurate records, you can easily import and merge your financial transactions from personal and business cards.
- Multiple Approvers: You can create complicated approval workflows with various parameters and logic to suit your needs. It will intelligently flag expenses that need your attention.
- Two-Way Synchronization: Perform real-time syncing of your data with accounting and taxing software, ensuring all data is up-to-date across the software.
- Tax Calculation: It helps you perform tax calculations by your land law. You can configure custom tax slabs, rates, codes, and other parameters.
- Delegated Access: You can give your CA, Attorney, and other employees empowered access to all your data. This ensures they can review everything but can’t make changes without your permission.
- PCI Compliance: All the data is protected through modern security standards, including PCI compliance and GDPR.
- Next-Day Expense Claims: Provide incentives to employees by submitting timely expense reports and issuing reimbursements with minimum delays.
- Emergency Medical Services: Ramp provides free medical and security advisory and emergency services for domestic and international travel.
- Travelling Preferences: It adapts and learns your preferences, including preferring airlines, seats, hotels, and timings, to create the most suitable plans for you.
- Cost Insights: Admins are provided with real-time expense reporting that gives them deep insights into trip costs from all employees.
- Integrations: It easily integrates with standard 3rd party services like Oracle, Financial Force, and Sage.
Pros
Cons
Pricing
- Free Trial: Lifetime free Basic Plan
- Price: They have three plans for the business. Free, Collect, and Control starting at $0, $5 and $9 per monthly user, respectively.
Link: https://use.expensify.com/expense-management
3) Happay
Best for the broadest range of Integrations
Happay lets you set up approval workflows for your business and ensures a seamless flow. You can also configure it to directly approve small expenses and ask for additional approvals in case of more significant costs. All transactions, including pending approvals, are made available to admins in real-time.
It provides automated expense reporting and analytics in tables, bar charts, and graphs that can be exported as PNG, CSV, or PDF formats. This is one of the best expense management software solutions to improve efficiency and ensure on-time payments/reimbursements, keeping employees and vendors happy.
Features:
- Smart Audits: The on-cloud intelligence audits all your financial transactions to analyze performance, figure out room for improvement, and suggest changes.
- Notifications: During any approval process, it sends push notifications to involved employees, vendors, and admins, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
- Automated Data Capturing: Employees can use the mobile app to upload images that get processed easily. AI-driven tools help you quickly capture, extract, and process all data from invoices.
- Approval Workflows: You can create advanced multi-variable hierarchical logic workflows based on cost centre, department, and history.
- Data Analytics: It provides complete visibility into all your expenses and analyses all transactions across departments, employees, and teams.
- Real-time Reporting: The dashboard provides real-time insights into all business activities. This includes pending approvals, in-process approvals, and cost overruns.
- Policy Expenses: You can set up strict policies to ensure employees are not paid for out-of-policy expenses.
- Reminders: On-time reminders keep you up-to-date on any urgent/high-priority tasks that may have skipped your mind. It can send push notifications via mobile, email, and web apps.
- Spending Analysis: Periodically analyze all your spending across the business to mitigate the risks of budget overruns, improve your vendor selection, and take better policy decisions.
- Integrated Travel Management: Seamlessly merge travel management expenses with other expenses to ensure quick filings/approvals from travel expenses.
- Analyse Performance: It helps you minimize gaps in approvals, expense filling, and reimbursements and ensures faster and more accurate processing of finances.
- Care: You can provide all your employees with a predefined standard of care that ensures proper procedures and policies are followed for maximum safety.
- Fare Freeze: It can block ticket when they are quoting at lower prices, ensuring minimum approval delays and cost-effective budget tickets.
Pros
Cons
Pricing: Contact Customer Support for Pricing
Link: https://happay.com/expense-management-software/
4) Rydoo
Best for managing small business needs
Rydoo is an ideal expense tracking software that allows you to perform expensing and management, ensuring no extra burdens during month/year ends. Employees can quickly scan all expense receipts from their phones and upload them using Easy Scan technology. Easy Scan extracts, populates, and processes all necessary details like date, amount, and currency in real-time for all invoices.
You can configure your company policies, like mileages, to ensure real-time costs can be seen as the employees travel. This keeps everyone better informed of expenses and provides faster processing. It helps you comply completely with the land law by strictly adhering to VAT, Sales Tax regulations.
Features:
- Real-time data insights: This helps you better understand your company’s spending behaviour to make better financial decisions. It gathers all data to provide a comprehensive overview of all details.
- Paperless Operations: Completely paperless operations ensure faster processing, minimization of manual errors, and a hassle-free experience. It also minimizes the chances of unexpected errors or missing data with accurate data extraction.
- Per Diems Management: Set your daily allowance rates and upload your jurisdiction’s defaults to have them appear dynamically for your travellers.
- Automated Expense Approvals: Configure parameters and rules to approve everyday day-to-day expenses without requiring your attention.
- Mitigate Out Of Policy Expense: You can create strict rules to define the expenses covered in your policy. Any invoices for out-of-policy fees would be rejected, saving you unnecessary spending.
- Rich Insights: The AI-driven systems analyze and provide critical business performance insights. It helps you move forward in the right direction with all branches, employees, and projects.
- Quick Onboarding: Rydoo’s team of experts helps you with a fast and effortless initial setup by creating the perfect onboarding plan for your needs.
- Snap: It allows you to save pictures of your receipts and retrieve them in future from the cloud when needed.
- Predictive Expense Forecasts: You can get a real-time view of all financial activities in your company and get accurate forecasts for expenses in the coming weeks/months. This helps you make plans and budgets in advance, ensuring no surprises.
- Automated Checks: Rydoo performs in-depth site audits and flags any suspicious behaviour. It keeps you updated about any alerts and threats.
- Rydoo Cards: It provides branded virtual and business cards for various business use cases, including one-time, recurring, or continuous expenses.
- Integrations: You can integrate it with more than 100+ ERP and 3rd party integrations.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Yes, 14 Days
- Price: The plan starts at €8 per month, billed annually.
Link: https://www.rydoo.com/expense/
5) DivvyPay
Best for Highly scalable expense management software.
DivvyPay is one of the best expense-tracking software that protects you from fraud through its advanced risk evaluation systems. It strictly enforces your budgets, performs dispute resolution, and protects your business from fraud and overcharging protection. You can use its free reimbursements to manage expenses like mileage and incentive easily.
The reports and charts help you better review and understand your expenses and take appropriate action. Its advanced filters help you make better decisions while approving or denying transactions. Policy enforcement tools are designed to ensure no out-of-policy payments are made to the employees, making it an ideal expense tracking software.
Features:
- Budget Alignment: You can align your budgets following your business requirement by setting up limits by department, team, or project.
- Approvals: Administrators can remotely view, manage, approve, or decline any fund request from their phone or web app.
- Expense Tracking: It allows you to track your business performance and real-time expenses and take appropriate actions to stay within the allocated budgets.
- Expense Reporting: You are provided with reports that can be quickly sorted and filtered to analyze performances based on a particular department, project, team, or individual budget.
- Budget Management: Budgeting tools allow you to predefine budgets and compare current and expected expenses. You can also use these tools to forecast upcoming costs and plan your business accordingly.
- Freedom: You can allow managers and team leaders to set their budgets and make financial plans accordingly.
- Predefined approval workflows: It reduces by burden by allowing you to define approval workflows for approving daily expenses to employees like sales lunch or coffee breaks.
- Enforceable Budgets: All your reimbursements are paid from a predefined budget. This ensures you never overspend your budget due to excessive reimbursements.
- Receipt Uploading: Employees can directly upload receipts through DivvyPay’s mobile applications. It intelligently reads and analyses receipts to find and save relevant details.
- Free Reimbursements: DivvyPay provides free-to-use reimbursements ideal for managing off-card expenses like mileage or cash reimbursements.
- Seamless Workflow: You can configure DivvyPay to mirror your account charts, saving you time for manual entry and ensuring accuracy.
- Expense Management Reports: It generates expense reports by performing receipt matching and rule-based categorization.
- Two-Step Transaction Approvals: Budget owners provide initial acceptance or rejection to reimbursement requests in a two-step approval system, and administrators are alerted to grant final approval.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Lifetime free Basic Plan.
- Price: Lifetime free
Link: https://getdivvy.com/expenses/
6) Airbase
Best for running detailed expense audit
Airbase is one of the best expense management solutions for business analysis and planning. It allows employees to upload receipts directly through the app. All receipt images are digitally processed with data extraction and storage, ensuring minimum human intervention.
Airbase allows you to configure company policies for all expenses, including the time window for receipt uploading, mandatory fields, budget restrictions, and allowances. It also flags/blocks any out-of-policy expenses. You can use it to explore in-depth audit trails for analyzing your business performance. Computerized transactions allow you to ensure on-time payments for all employees and vendors without requiring effort.
Features:
- Audit Trail: It captures every expense detail in real-time and utilizes them for performing a periodic audit trail involving notes, receipts, and other documentation.
- Receipt Management: Your employees can use it to capture and populate expense details using OCR technology, allowing for faster submission and approvals.
- Mobile App: It has a native app for Android and iOS that allows you to access business data and manage activities remotely.
- Real-time Spend Reporting: You can track real-time spending by monitoring all your spending. It can further be used to approve and deny any transaction case-by-case basis.
- Forecasts: It uses your existing data to understand spending patterns and user behaviour. This is used to accurately forecast future spending to ensure you never exceed the budget.
- Prevent Fraud and Scams: The advanced pattern recognition techniques detect any suspicious activity or abnormal transactions and report them at the earliest.
- Virtual Credit Cards: Airbase allows you to create and distribute virtual credit cards for your employees. You retain complete administrative controls with the ability to set spending limits.
- Operations: It helps manage and streamline processes by directly routing requests for approvals to the responsible approver via email and Slack. This ensures minimum delays and rapid turnaround times.
- Categories and Tags: All expenses and transactions can be assigned specific tags and categories to retrieve similar transactions easily.
- Full Stack: All expense management, reporting, payments, and analysis happen in a single interface, eliminating the need for internal communication channels.
- Direct Payments: It has in-built tools and systems to process approved payments and make them directly to the employee’s accounts.
- Catch-All Emails: Employees can send receipts to a pre-configured catch-all email address that matches and stores their receipts with respective transaction records.
Pros
Cons
Pricing: Contact Customer Support For Pricing
Link: https://www.airbase.com/modules/expense-management
7) Navan
Best travel and expense management system
Navan (formerly TripActions) is an ideal expense management solution that enjoys real-time reporting of all your expenses. You can easily track your transactions across all cards and reimbursements. It provides data-driven insights that help you minimize spending leakage, improve financial forecasts, and ensure better optimization of financial resources.
Navan has in-built capabilities to manage your taxation in compliance with land laws. You can easily capture and submit details related to VAT and other taxes. All transactions are categorized into predefined labels, ensuring manual input is unnecessary. It provides expedited payments for all reimbursements in more than 40 countries and 25 currencies.
Features:
- Scalability: Digital reconciliations, AI-driven receipt scannings, and auto-generated expense reports ensure that the software scales up with your business requiring minimum additional efforts.
- Real-time Analytics: You can track and manage your business expenses by staying up-to-date with the latest financial activities in real-time.
- Control: You can easily control all spending rules and enforce all your company policies for all employee payments.
- Global Card Linkage: Your employees can link their existing cards from Visa or Mastercard to track all their expenses while retaining the card benefits.
- Unified Dashboard: It provides a unified dashboard for managing business expenses with data filtering, searching, and live maps support.
- Productivity: You can use it to improve business productivity by automating reconciliations and eliminating the need for expense reports through innovative expense management technology.
- Analytics: All business spending is tracked and monitored by powerful Analytics tools. AI-enabled systems use this data to provide actionable insights into your business.
- Automated Expense Management: This business expense management software automatically categorizes transactions and expense details, requiring no human intervention.
- MFA and SSO: It has native support for Multi-Factor Authentication that provides great security to critical business accounts. SSO eases the login process and is a huge convenience for users.
- Backups: Navan performs daily backups, ensuring the safety of your data against unexpected losses. Multiple geographically distinct servers are used to implement geographical redundancy.
- Reward Programs: Employees earn rewards when they do business travelling on Navan Cards. They can redeem these rewards in future for personal usage.
- Guidance: Navan’s team of experts provides proper guidance through one-on-one sessions, conferences, online events, and documentation.
- Dynamic Limits: The active policies allow you to adjust the spending budgets dynamically based on various factors and conditions.
- Travel Costs: Reduce travel costs by incentivizing employees who spend less during business trips.
- Support: Their AI-driven assistant answers your common queries and frequent issues and helps you find quick solutions with minimum effort.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Lifetime Free Basic Plan
- Price: Contact Customer Support For Pricing
Link: https://navan.com/expense-management
8) Brex
Best AI-driven business expense tracker app
Brex is among the best expense management software solutions for managing the global workforce with support for fast international transactions with ease. It provides reimbursements in local currencies for over 70 countries. You can use it to perform live tracking of finances across every department, team, and individual.
Brex helps in data collection, which enables you to close the books faster. It matches the receipts with transactions, generates memos, sends approval notifications, and prepares data for tax filings. You can use its OCR technology to check tokens in various languages and currencies.
Features:
- Tax Collection: It collects and stores all tax information, including VAT, that can be used for tax filings with your local governing authorities.
- Personalization: The booking software dynamically learns employee preferences and searches for their preferred airlines and hotels in the future.
- Iternary Management: Brex allows users to make unlimited itinerary changes based on their requirements without issues.
- Policy Control: It provides custom controls for setting limits across cards, reimbursements, travel platforms, departments, etc.
- Approval Hierarchy: You can define approval hierarchy so that any transaction requiring manual approvals may be directly forwarded to the concerned individual. It can also be used to handle large procurements requiring multiple licenses.
- Expense Rules: Allows you to create easily understandable expense rules that govern the approval/rejection of expenses.
- Stipends: Using predefined rules, you can issue one-time or recurring stipends for various use cases like wellness, performance, and behaviour.
- Import/Export Data: It provides built-in functionality to export transactional data directly with the ERP CSV transfer feature.
- Automation: It integrates well with leading automation platforms to improve productivity and efficiency. This streamlines expense management processes, bookkeeping, payroll, and HR management.
- 2 Way Sync: Brex synchronizes all data with your accounting software, ensuring minimum data discrepancies across platforms.
- Spend Control and Approvals: Helps implement spend controls, ensuring no department or branch exceeds the budget. The approval system provides necessary expenses that need manual approvals before being processed.
- Live Support: Their team of experienced professionals can help you with initial setup, management, and frequent issues via email, 24×7 calls, or live chat.
- Expense Capture: The expense capturing tools allow employees to upload photos of receipts directly to the server. The advanced systems extract, store, and process the data.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
- Free Trial: No
- Pricing: Contact Customer Support For Pricing
Link: https://www.brex.com/product/spend-management
FAQs
Best Expense Tracking Software: Top Picks!
| Provider | Region/Currency Support | Mobile Apps | Free Trial | Integrated Payments and travel expenses | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ramp | 195 Countries with 40+ Currencies | Android and iOS | Lifetime free Basic Plan | Yes | Learn More |
| Expensify | 58 Currencies | iOS, iPadOS and Android | Free Plan | Yes | Learn More |
| Happay | 150+ Countries | Android and iOS, iPadOS | Lifetime free Basic Plan | Yes | Learn More |
| Rydoo | 19 Countries | iOS, iPadOS, and Android | No | No | Learn More |
| DivvyPay | USD | Android and iOS | Yes, 14 Days | No | Learn More |
The Verdict
We’ve discussed some of the best expense tracking software solutions. While all of them are great, some are more geared towards specific use cases. Our final verdict should be instrumental in helping you make the right call.