Manage it right: Top expense management solutions for SMBs

An expense management solution consists of several streamlined processes large organizations and SMBs use to process, monitor, and audit their expenses spent on the business. The main purpose of expense management is to track business expenditure on various aspects such as employee compensation, travel expenditure, material charges incurred, and more. For IT departments, and especially chief information officers, expense management is even more daunting as new technologies such as cloud computing changes staffing roles and the overall approach to IT spending. This seemingly trivial business process can be very complex to manage manually. Thankfully, several expense management systems are available in the market that can serve the needs of different organizations operating in different domains and sizes.

Having an expense management system in place reduces the chances of human errors while making it easy to prevent expense fraud. It also helps organizations speed up the process and approvals while reducing administrative costs. Expense management software also helps organizations mitigate vague travel policies, lack of visibility, and other expense-related inefficient or ineffective processes.

In this article, we will list some of the top expense management software solutions available. We have considered several aspects: features, cross-platform availability, multilevel approval process, ability to handle heterogeneous bills/receipts, costs, and more to list them down.

Zoho Expense

Zoho Expense is a fully loaded, easy-to-use online expense reporting software with streamlined features and support. It comes with solid customization options and has an impressive set of integration options with several services. While this software can serve larger organizations, it is best suited for SMBs concerning the workflows and licensing costs.

Zoho Expense offers an impressive set of features such as receipt auto scanning, which supports 10 languages, adding expenses by importing files, create and allot per-diem rates, expense merging, billing clients or customers, and integrating the receipts and expense forms to email. It also comes with corporate debit and credit expense management options along with fully customizable report generation. The tool can also provide strong workflows that can be customized to provide insightful analytics and approval management processes.

Zoho Expense is one of the least expensive solutions and offers the most value-for-money option on the list. It is available in three different plans, including a completely free version, a premium version costing $5 per-user per-month, and the enterprise version costing $8 per-user per-month. Both the premium and enterprise versions are billed annually. More information about the plans can be found here.

Certify

Certify is yet another user-friendly expense management software that comes with strong travel and trade-related expense management features. It offers excellent features, mobile app support, and reporting abilities. Certify offers an impressive set of features, such as receipt capture with great OCR accuracy, receipt storage, geo-location-based services, along with several other regular features.

It offers an automated expense report creation that can be highly customized. The service also helps organizations in real-time compliance control to prevent fraudulent activities. Certify also comes with great integration options that help companies automate their workflows and processes. This service is available in three pricing variants starting at $8 per-user per-month. It also has a professional and enterprise version with several more features suiting the needs of both SMBs and large organizations. More information about these variants can be found here.

Expensify

Expensify is one of the most powerful and feature-rich expense management tools on our list. Unlike several services and tools, Expensify doesn’t just target SMBs. It can also serve large corporations with a complex and large list of integration and operational needs. It comes with a streamlined mobile application and is capable of automating the entire pre-accounting process. Expensify can detect duplicate invoices, perform receipt auditing, and train the workforce to code, categorize, and review the expenses.

Expensify integrates with almost all industry-leading accounting and finance software, tools, and services. It also allows organizations to integrate tax and travel services, receipt providers, and other practice management platforms such as Thomson Reuters, CCH, and Practice Engine. Expensify has different pricing plans for individuals and groups and starts at $4.99 per-month per-user. Billing can be made as a subscription model or in a pay-per-use manner. More information about the billing can be found here.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks, which was once an invoicing solution, is now a fully mature online accounting and expense management service. While it can support large organizations and corporations, the company tends to target SMBs and individuals. FreshBooks comes with a very intuitive UI that is very easy to learn and adapt. Creating invoices, customizing invoice branding, double-entry accounting, detailed client record fetching, inventory tracking, and automatic mileage tracking are some of FreshBooks’ key features.

FreshBooks does an excellent job in estimates and proposals. It can handle estimates to expenses, e-signatures, and rich proposals. It also offers invoice and expense management along with time-tracking abilities. FreshBooks is available for mobile platforms for Android and iOS and comes with several add-ons to suit individual needs.

FreshBooks best suits service-based businesses, freelancers, and entrepreneurs that need a way to track expenses and revenue for simple reports. The pricing starts at $4.50 per-month and also comes with a custom pricing option for businesses with more complex needs.

Rydoo

Rydoo provides end-to-end support and functionality for expense management, analytics, and a one-stop dashboard to manage them all. What makes Rydoo unique is its role-based feature sets that helps in managing the expenses incurred.

Apart from providing all the expense management features, Rydoo also comes with other add-ons that increase functionality. Rydoo Insight is an add-on that helps organizations make business decisions concerning capital spending. Rydoo Audit performs expense audits and comes with expert audit adviser’s assistance 24/7. It also comes with a travel add-on that simplifies all the expenses associated with travel while integrating them in central expense management. It has a very intuitive and highly customizable report generation option for better insights. The plans start at almost $7.20 per-user when billed annually. There are more pricing plans available to suit the needs of different users.

There are several other tools and services in the category that are available to perform expense management for individuals and companies of all shapes and sizes. No matter which service you choose to handle your expenses, you need to be cautious in data feeding. Human errors are common in expense management, and avoiding them can solve and streamline the otherwise troublesome expense tracking and management process.

Featured image: Shutterstock