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This software category is quite new, so if you haven't heard of it, prepare to have your mind blown 🤯
Expense management software replaces your need for a traditional business credit card, is totally free to use (no fees, no subscription required), will give you cash back on your business purchases (literally cash in your account), and protect you from unwanted charges on your credit card.
Now that we've got your attention, we'll explain.
With modern expense management solutions you can quickly create virtual and physical credit cards with set budgets. This comes in handy for a myriad of reasons:
When you sign up for software or purchase something, you can quickly create a virtual credit card, put it on file, and freeze the card so no further purchases can be made with it.
So say for example, you want to try a new software and sign up for a free trial, simply create a virtual card to put on the account. Want to keep the subscription? Unfreeze the card and set the monthly or yearly budget for the card. If you forget? Well, the card can't be charged because you froze it. This puts you in total control.
We create and use virtual credit cards for each of our software subscriptions and vendors (well, all of our business purchases to be exact). If a software subscription decides to raise their price on us, well guess what? Our card can't be charged because we set a specific budget based on what our expected price would be. This allows us always be on-top of our spending decisions.
If you have team members that requires access to a credit card, gone are the days of waiting for your traditional credit card issuer to mail you a new card 👋.
With expense management platforms you can create cards for each team member within seconds. The best part? You can set budgets for each employee and never have to worry about them overspending.
And if someone leaves your company? No problem, log into your expense management platform and freeze the card. And you don't even need to worry about them giving you back the card.
If it's not clear already, expense management cards give you a ton of control and protection. Because you're putting down a unique credit card number with each vendor, you can easily see there are any unwanted charges (opposed to looking through an end-of-month statement with a traditional credit card).
In fact, one of our vendor's employees was stealing their customers credit cards and taking shopping trips to Home Depot and Walmart. Well, this must have been happening quite a bit under the radar (she was working there for 15 years), but no one really knew what was happening. That is, until we noticed these peculiar charges on our card and knew that our credit card had been stolen since only that vendor had access to it.
We quickly froze the card, and because we were able to confidently able to share with our vendor that someone in their organization had stolen our credit card number, they were able to launch an investigation and discovered it was in-fact one of their team members.
The point here is, most people use one credit card for all of their purchases. If someone steals your credit card number then just think of all the steps you need to go through: cancelling your credit card, and then updating your credit card on file with dozens of other subscriptions and vendors. It's a logistical nightmare and huge time sink. With a virtual card, you simply freeze that card...and you're done.
All of the benefits above and there are more? You bet!
Credit card interchange is the the main way these expense management platform make revenue. This means that every time you use one of your credit cards, the expense management solution earns a small % of each transaction (at no additional cost to you).
How does this benefit you? Well, it means the expense management software is totally free for you to use. This means you get a beautiful software, with a friendly UI/UX (instead of your banks old interface), and it's totally free. No annual fees, no hidden fees, nothing.
It gets even better! Not only are these expense management platforms free to use, they even give you cash back rewards from 1-1.5%.
One of the construction companies we recommended BILL Spend & Expense to decided to split the cash back earnings amongst his employees as Christmas time as annual bonuses.
My journey started with Expensify (The OG) in Feb 2018. Even though was only 5–6 years ago, expense management looked very different when compared with what's available today.
I set up a filter in my email to recognize invoices and auto-forward them over to Expensify. From there, Expensify would auto-classify the expense and add the receipt and expense into QuickBooks Online (QBO).This was a huge time saver for me, and for a few years I was happily paying an annual subscription fee for the service.
Then I found Divvy (now BILL Spend and Expense) through a vendor who asked if they could pay an invoice with a credit card (I had required ACH up until that point), explaining that they had all of their budgeting set up through Divvy (and they had budgetary approval through Divvy for our services already). I was intrigued—and then he gave me a deep-dive overview of their Divvy account, talking about how much he loved it. In looking further into it after that, I learned that Divvy was another expense management solution which allows users to set up virtual credit cards (for each vendor), assign the QBO expense category, and custom limits, along with over-encompassing budgets for each card.
Not only that, but I could set up the same email forwarding filter like I had previously, so not only was the expense added perfectly to QBO, but the receipt got perfectly matched as well. Ever wonder what an auto-reconciling QBO account feels like? Yeah, that's what I had (well, and still have).
Oh! And all of this was totally free—yeah, I didn't believe it initially either...
So yes—I made the exception to accept the CC payment (they got some reward points)—and that was my last day with Expensify. There's many more reasons I'm a fan (more on this below).
Over the years, we evaluated all the core competitors and we kept coming back to BILL Spend & Expense as our top pick for small businesses. BILL has no bank minimums as an eligibility requirement, so there is literally not one reason we can think of not to use them. Apply for an account here.
That said, we also love Ramp for larger businesses who can meet the eligibility requirements of a $75k bank minimum, so make sure to keep reading about them if you fit in that boat.
Let's dive deeper.
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The financial platform for your global ambition. Global spend & expense management solution.
Airwallex is our top pick for managing international payments and multi-currency business operations.
It’’s a full-stack financial platform built for global business. With Airwallex, you can spin up local business accounts in multiple currencies, pay contractors around the world, hold and spend money without being forced into conversions, and manage team expenses all from one dashboard.
We’ve used it ourselves, and the experience couldn’t have been easier. The first time we paid our Australian video editor through Airwallex, he simply sent us a US-based bank account (powered by Airwallex), and we paid him in USD like he lived down the street. No FX headaches. No clunky setup. It just worked.
If you have vendors or customers oversea's, Airwallex is seriously a must-have for your business. Instead of piecing together tools like Wise, PayPal, your bank, expense management solutions, and virtual cards, Airwallex takes care of ALL of it for you.
And the best part? Business accounts are free, so go ahead and sign-up for an account.
BILL Spend & Expense (Formerly Divvy) The spend management platform for teams of all sizes (customizable virtual cards, budgeting, auto-reconciling, and expense reimbursement).
I'm sure you've heard of a business credit card? Divvy is a replacement for your typical corporate card. It's totally free to use (no annual fee), you get rewards and it has a much more comprehensive feature set, giving you the ability to create virtual credit cards for each vendor with spending limits. Further, Divvy is an expense management solution. Bought a new marketing software? Categorize it and when integrated with Quickbooks Online, it will automatically reconcile your books for you.
Simply put, if you are a business owner living in the United States, you are missing out if you're not using an expense management solution + a divvy business credit card. There are other players in the market, and we've used all of the core competitors (Ramp, Brex, Expensify, and Airbase), and we're here to tell you to look no further than Divvy (newly rebranded to BILL Spend & Expense). (Did we mention it's totally free? 👀)
Divvy gives us so much control when it comes to our spending. We can easily create a virtual credit card, set a budget and Quickbooks category within seconds for each different vendor. 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, Divvy's 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.
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, Divvy 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). Not to mention the positive affect it has on your employees, as they get to feel empowered and like a trusted part of the team.
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 Divvy 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 Divvy 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!
Out of all the competitors, Divvy 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:
Divvy 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.
The Divvy eligibility requirements are way more accessible than that of Ramp and Brex (who both make their account criteria unnecessarily high). Divvy is great for startups and teams of all sizes, even if you're just getting your business started.
Divvy is the best tool in the spend management, business credit cards, budgeting, and basic accounting automation suite for most businesses of all sizes.
The spend management platform for mid-size teams (customizable virtual cards, budgeting, auto-reconciling, and expense reimbursement).
Ramp is a corporate card and expense management platform designed to help companies control spend, automate finance tasks, and gain real-time visibility into expenses. It's a leader in the spend/expense management and accounting automation space, with a clean UI/UX, tons of reporting features, and fast search functionality. Ramp is built for scaling businesses who want better financial control without the friction of traditional banks.
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:
Super fast, taking just minutes to issue cards and accounts.
Easy navigation with CMD+K search and an AI chatbot for help.
Immediate visibility into transactions and spend patterns.
Easy to configure budgets via spend programs and card restrictions.
Automatic retries and Gmail integration for company-wide receipt fetching.
Native integrations with top accounting platforms, plus powerful reporting and tagging features.
Alerts via mobile app, SMS, and Slack for ultimate visibility
1.5% cashback standard with less complexity compared to other tools.
Custom contract uploads and renewal alerts.
No annual fees, no user fees, and no hidden fees. Revenue comes from interchange fees and an optional paid tier for larger teams. BUT Important: You need around $25K in your business bank account at signup to get approved. Your credit limit will be based on your cash balance. If you're looking for an expense management solution with no bank minimum, then check out BILL Spend & Expense (typically better for smaller businesses while Ramp is better for growing/scaling businesses with cash flow).
Accounting software for small and medium teams typically based in the US
We find that teams based in the US tend to use QuickBooks Online, and businesses outside of the US tend to lean more toward Xero.
This is important because it means that the features QBO is building is more focused on things like US Sales Tax laws, while Xero may have more accounting features helpful outside of the US especially.
Also, accountants inside of the US are often more proficient with QBO as compared to Xero (although they should be familiar with both).
P.S. We highly recommend QBO over QuickBooks Desktop because of their robust API—you're not going to be integrating QuickBooks Desktop easily with anything.
Rating: D-
Some people have mentioned that QuickBooks Online allows for some expense management features like virtual credit cards, that said, a tool like Bill Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy) does so much more for expense management than simply allowing for a one-off virtual card though. Unlike QBO, a proper expense management tool allows you to go deeper, as it ties in individual and team budgets (across the entire company), all to ensure your company only allocates what they have budgeted for.
QBO also does not have proper receipt matching that automatically ties the receipt from your email to the individual transaction.
QBO does not have credit card rewards with their virtual credit card solution either.
Rating: C
This is one of those areas that it makes sense that they cover, but you can tell it was an add-on versus being their core service. Payroll is boring, and hey, QBO does the job, it's just not a straightforward user-experience, and let's just say we used it for 4 years before switching to Gusto, and there's not a single bone in my body that misses QBO for payroll. It was also incredibly painful closing it down with them, reporting to all the Department of Labor agencies, and everything. Save yourself the time and skip out on QBO for Payroll.
Rating: D
If you compare QuickBooks Online to any of the best time tracking software on the market, you'll see just how wildly barebones, slow, and underwhelming it is. Even just the process of logging into QBO feels like you're pushing a boulder uphill, now you need to do it any time you track software? No thanks, I'll pass.
They designed it more to be for people who just need to submit their time one-per-day or once-per-week, they are building to check a box, not to be leading the time tracking space.
A spend management (virtual credit card) platform for venture-backed startups and large teams. They also have a barebones checking account product called Brex Cash.
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 their 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).
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:
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 YC network, getting most YC companies to use them by offering as many perks to them as possible. When actually comparing Brex against the competitors though 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—Divvy and Ramp are far superior in many of those areas.
The spend management platform for small and mid-size teams (customizable virtual cards, budgeting, auto-reconciling, and expense reimbursement).
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).
Rippling lets you easily manage your employees’ payroll, benefits, expenses, corporate cards, bill pay, & more—in one place. The majority of our coverage is focused on their Rippling Spend product.
Rippling Spend could beconsidering if you have 50+ employees or are already in the Rippling ecosystem (e.g., using their Human Capital Management and Payroll products). Otherwise, we suggest exploring either BILL Spend and Expense or Ramp.
Here’s why:
Many of Spend’s core features and value adds are only accessible if you use Rippling’s other products, HCM and Payroll, which enable you to leverage all of your employee data. Without this ability to leverage employee data, you only have access to a subset of features and functionalities that we feel do not offer the same value as both BILL S&E and Ramp, which come at a lower cost. This makes BILL S&E and Ramp strong options for companies seeking standalone spend management solutions.
On the other hand, if you:
You might find value in Rippling Spend. The features Rippling touts in their marketing materials (policies, card groups, etc.), that leverage the data that’s in Rippling’s other platforms, truly are great offerings that undoubtedly save users time – time spent manually entering data, looking across multiple platforms for data, reviewing policies, reconciling expense reports, etc.
Just make sure you watch out for:
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