5 Best Expense Management Software & Tools 2023

What is BILL Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy)?

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 Credit Card

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.

Divvy Employee Cards

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.

Divvy Rewards

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!

Divvy Expense Management Experience

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.

Divvy Eligibility Requirements

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.

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.

Expense Management

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.

Receipt Matching

QBO also does not have proper receipt matching that automatically ties the receipt from your email to the individual transaction.

Credit Card Rewards

QBO does not have credit card rewards with their virtual credit card solution either.

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.

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 receipts@expensify.com 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).

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. (Oh and it's totally free 👀)

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:

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).

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).

They do although have slightly higher requirements than that of Divvy. You need to have somewhere around $70k 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.

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.