BILL Spend & Expense

The BILL Spend & Expense eligibility requirements are way more accessible than that of Ramp and Brex (who both make their account criteria high). BILL Spend & Expense is great for teams of all sizes, even if you're just getting your business started.

BILL Spend & Expense is one of the best tools in the spend management, business credit cards, budgeting, and basic accounting automation suite for most businesses of all sizes.

Out of all the competitors, BILL Spend & Expense has the best UI/UX and does a fantastic job at natively integrating with QuickBooks Online (for automating your expense reconciling process), and handles team budgeting like a dream:

BILL Spend & Expense allows you to 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.

This is the feature we care most about, and we have a story to prove why

A while back, Alex caught two charges on our statement that didn't add up, one at Home Depot, one at Walmart. The card was only on file with our accountant at the time, and only with them, so we knew immediately something was off. We froze it, called the office, and it turned out an employee who had been there for 15 years had been stealing card numbers. The accountant launched an investigation, called the police, and she was eventually caught.

The reason we were able to isolate it so quickly is because that card existed for one purpose and one vendor. If we'd been running everything through a single shared corporate card, that charge would have been buried in a list of fifty others and we might not have caught it for weeks. Not to mention, we'd have to spend at least 1-2 full days updating our credit card on file with every single subscription (oh gosh, what a nightmare and waste of time).

That's the case for virtual cards. You create a dedicated card for each vendor or employee, set a limit, and if anything ever looks wrong it takes about five seconds to freeze or cancel that one card without touching anything else. We set a hard limit on every subscription we run and if a vendor decides to raise their price and charge us more, the card declines. We find out, we decide if we want to approve it. It's incredible.

As your team grows you can layer in approval flows, employee cards with individual budgets, and spend policies but even at its most basic, the vendor-specific card setup alone is worth switching for.

Expenses show up immediately after a card is used, and they're already tied to the correct budget or vendor. There's no waiting for statements or manually compiling reports at the end of the month. You can also set up approval flows so employees request funds before spending, so everything is predictable.

This removes so much back-and-forth. Instead of chasing people for explanations after the fact, you're approving spend before it happens and seeing it in real time as it comes through.

Each card can be mapped to a category, and then its transactions flow directly into QuickBooks with the right classification. If you route receipts correctly, they attach automatically as well.

The flow is a charge happens, it gets categorized, and then it's correctly in QuickBooks without anyone touching it. Month-end close gets a lot faster when most of your expenses are already clean!

BILL S&E integrates with most popular accounting tools, but if for whatever reason it's not supported, you can export everything as a CSV and import it into your system. It's not as seamless as a native integration, but it still saves a lot of time and keeps you from being locked out of automation.

Have multiple employees that need their own corporate card? Create a card for them and set a spending limit, that's all you need to do. You can change the spending limit for each employee, make it $50 or $500, BILL Spend & Expense cards allow you to be flexible.

If they leave the company, simply freeze the card (you have total control, just think of what the process is like with a typically corporate card. Issuing a new card for an employee is an annoying process, as is cancelling it).

All of this also benefits your employees as they don't need to front expenses or submit reimbursements as often, and they have a clear boundary for what they can spend. It feels more controlled, but also more empowering. We love giving cards to our employees to make them truly feel like a part of the team, and we don't lose sleep over any unexpected charges happening as we have full control.

While virtual cards will cover most spend, BILL S&E also handles out-of-pocket employee expenses. Employees can submit expenses, attach receipts, and get reimbursed quickly.

Everything shows up alongside card transactions, so you don't have to juggle separate systems or track down missing receipts. That said, we recommend issuing credit cards to your team instead as a best practice so they don't even need to pay for anything upfront with their own cash.

The rewards are pretty standard with others in the business credit card 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).

One customer that we recommended BILL Spend & Expense to started using it and quickly saw his reward balance grow. He decided to use the reward funds as Christmas bonuses for his employees. He said, "it's money that's just sitting there, and if I can give them a little extra to take home at the end of the year, it's something cool I get to do."

Travel rewards are also a perk with BILL Spend & Expense as they are partnered with TravelPerk. While we haven't cashed in our travel rewards yet, it's a great option for our next company retreat!