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Soooo you've finally decided it's time to set up an expense management solution. Now to choose which one 🤔
We've personally used Divvy (BILL Spend & Expense), Ramp, Brex, and Expensify and we're excited to share my thoughts on all the options to help you make the decision on which may be best for your team. Lets go!
If you don't want to spend a ton of time researching which solution is best for you, here is the quick lowdown on how to choose between our top two recommendations—BiLL Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy) and Ramp. It comes down to your business size, and the available funds in your bank account in order to get approved.
BILL Bank Minimum: $0
Ramp Bank Minimum: $75,000
Both BILL & Ramp are free to use and do not require personal guarantees.
If you're a smaller business that doesn't have $75,000 your bank quite consistently, BILL is going to be your best choice. They don't have bank minimum's to get approved and their expense management platform is more-so built for smaller teams. Construction businesses, real estate teams, contractors, nonprofits, service based agencies, and even sole proprietors would be best suited for BILL.
When we first learned about expense management software, our business was mainly a service based integration business and we didn't have $75k just sitting in our account to even consider Ramp.
We thought about gaming the system, perhaps letting some money sit in the bank account in order to get approved for an account, but ultimately we didn't want the risk of Ramp revoking our access at any stage if that cash flow had gone done. With that, we don't recommend you trying to gamify getting approval for Ramp either.
If you don't have $75k more or less always in your account, you can truly skip the rest of this article and apply for BILL here.
If you easily meet that $75k bank minimum, and you're a growing business, then we recommend applying for Ramp. Ramp has built features taking into consideration larger teams.
For example, say two people at the company are paying for the same subscription, Ramp can flag that duplicate spending to the finance team.
Ramp's Intelligence feature can also give you guidance on where you may be able to negotiate down vendor costs, as they have access to what other companies your size are paying for services and subscriptions.
As our business grew and we hit the $75k bank minimum, we couldn't help but apply for a Ramp account. We knew we'd love it, the UI/UX is beautiful, but the software migration costs from BILL to Ramp would be way too high for us to consider switching, especially since we've been happy with BILL (it does everything we'd expect an expense management solution to do). It's been 5+ years of using Bill and we truly love it.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty, keep reading our BILL vs Ramp vs Brex vs Expensify comparison ⤵️
We've used all of the core competitors (Ramp, Brex, Expensify, and Airbase), and we're here to tell you that if you're a small business (<20 employees), look no further than BILL. (Oh and it's totally free 👀)
BILL has the best UI/UX, does a fantastic job at natively integrating with QuickBooks Online (for automating your expense reconciling process), and handles team budgeting like a dream:
BILL's requirements to open an account are also way more accessible than that of Ramp and Brex (who both make their account criteria unnecessarily high). There is no barrier to entry. BILL is great for startups and teams of all sizes, even if you're just getting your business started.
Create a virtual credit card and map it to the respective category + set up an email forwarding filter within your email once, and every single time the card is charged, your QuickBooks Online is already reconciled and up-to-date with a PDF of the receipt.
BILL gives us so much control when it comes to our spending. We simply set a budget for each credit card for the exact amount that we know will be charged. If a subscription service decides to increase their pricing and charge our card, it will decline. And we like that, because we want to be the one deciding if someone should charge us more or not. 💪
Because we're able to put virtual cards down with each vendor, BILL allowed us (and our vendor) to actually catch a person that committed fraud by stealing and using our credit card 🤯 Of course, the employee of our vendor was fired. Catching them would have been impossible to pin down if we had a generic credit card on file. We share this story in this 1 minute video.
The rewards are pretty standard with others in the space, getting somewhere around 1–1.5% on all categories, with a bit more in certain categories (higher % when making payments weekly—less if made bi-weekly or monthly).
Because of all this, we whole-heartedly believe BILL (formerly Divvy) is the best tool in the spend management, budgeting, and basic accounting automation suite for teams that have under 20-40 or employees.
A consideration that slights contradicts the above—if you're a larger team and you're already using BILL Pay for financial operations, it also probably makes sense to stay within the BILL ecosystem for your expense management solution.
If we've sold you, sign up for BILL Spend & Expense (Divvy).
Ramp is one of the clear leaders in the spend/expense management, budgeting space, and accounting automation space with a slightly different focus than that of Divvy. (It's totally free also 👀). Ramp is more so focused on larger-scaling teams.
They have a great UI/UX, tons of reporting/insights features, and a super clean and fast search functionality to find exactly what you're looking for:
They do although have higher requirements than that of BILL. You need to have $75k sitting in your business bank account at the time of applying in order to be approved, which might be tough for businesses that don't really need to be sitting on cash in the bank.
Like the other platforms listed here, Ramp has the same virtual card functionality (and physical cards for employees). You'll want to spin up a virtual card for each company you use with Ramp, and you can even restrict (lock) these cards to a specific merchant.
Ramp business corporate cards have unlimited 1.5% cash back, which is quite good (slightly higher than BILL).
Ramp is more so for larger teams, think a distributed remote team with employees all over the world. But with more employees, comes more need for insights and data on spending. Ramp allows you to see your company's spend all in one place. Further, they have AI insights which will alert you of cost saving opportunities like duplicate subscriptions, sudden increases in spend, and possible lower pricing plans available. We think this is super cool, and is a big reason why we'd recommend Ramp for teams with 30-40+ employees.
One bit that I noticed when using Ramp is that they are a bit more focused on SMS interactions instead of having a fully-featured mobile app (unlike that of Divvy for example). Ramp only has an iOS app and it's mainly just for taking photos of receipts and matching transactions.
This might be a positive for those who have employees that aren't as tech-savvy, and you just need them to text a receipt in for it to tie to the expense management side of things (something that Divvy doesn't allow for).
All-in-all, they are focused a bit more broadly than that of Divvy, moving more into the accounting automation side of things and integrating with a few more accounting tools natively. They really have an impressive suite of tools and are a good option.
If you're a larger team, apply for Ramp using this link. Just remember, you need to have $75K in your bank account to get approved.
Brex has run into a bit of an odd situation in recent years—while focusing on growth, they apparently took on too many small-mid size businesses, which led to them axing accounts of many of the customers out of nowhere.
They are now only allowing venture-backed startups onto their platform, or mid-size businesses doing at-least $400k/mo in revenue ($4.8m/yr). They are trying to target start-ups who raised money, or enterprises (think Uber or Doordash).
We actually had a Brex account for many years when first evaluating it (checking in on how it evolved over the years), and recently, we were actually one of the many that were pulled into the axing account mess (luckily we ultimately decided on Divvy after initial evaluation of Brex, and have been happily using Divvy for 5+ years now).
That said, when trying to log back into my account to add some screenshots to this post, I was met with a redirection loop and the following message from support upon reaching out:
With Brex no longer serving small to medium-sized businesses, and laying off 20% of their staff in January 2024, we can't help but think that Ramp's rapid growth has forced them to re-think a few things. We just can't get excited about Brex.
While they have a "banking" component, it's more of just a simple checking account, and their banking features are not as robust as that of a full-fledged business-focused bank like Mercury.
All-in-all, they seem to be relying quite heavily on their Y Combinator (YC) startup network, getting most YC companies to use them by offering as many perks to them as possible. When actually comparing Brex against the competitors when it comes to automatic reconciling of your expenses in your accounting software, and just overall UI/UX, there's a lot to be desired—BILL and Ramp are far superior in many of those areas. Even if you fit the requirements for Brex, we recommend using Ramp instead.
Expensify is one of the original expense management solutions on the market. We actually used Expensify for the first few years in business (more recently switching to Divvy).
It started as a simple invoice/receipt scraping tool that you'd forward your receipts into [email protected] via email, and it would pull out all of the details, learn from past classifications, and sync that over to your accounting software like QBO or Xero.
They have more recently moved into the virtual credit card experience, realizing that if the charge starts with a virtual credit card, all the categorization is way more consistent and seamless (whereas that's where Divvy, Brex, and Ramp all started).
While Expensify was a leader in the space, they are more so now playing catch-up as the options above are far more superior.
Have more questions that we didn't cover? Shoot us a message via chat. We're always evolving the content on our site.
A lot of people have been asking us lately about if they even need an expense management tool like BILL if they are using Mercury, as it too has virtual cards.
While we know it's super confusing, we use both Mercury and BILL (Divvy). Mercury is not a spend management or budgeting tool.
Just creating virtual cards does not mean you can actually scale a team and keep close track of budgets and receipt matching + QBO automatic reconciling without a proper expense management solution.
If you're looking for a business bank though, we use, love, and highly recommend Mercury. Be sure to sign up with one of their perks here.
Overall, there are only two expense management platforms we recommend considering. BILL (Divvy) for small businesses (<20-40 employees) due to the $0 bank minimum requirements and features that are user friendly to small teams.
That said, if your team is already using BILL Pay for other financial operations, then perhaps staying within the BILL ecosystem makes sense for your expense management solution.
If you have a growing team (or are a start-up that raised money), and easily have $75k in the bank, we recommend using Ramp due to their features that are built more for scaling teams.
Apply for BILL Spend & Expense (<20 employees).
Apply for Ramp (Growing teams).
Both BILL + Ramp are totally free expense management platforms.
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