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What is an Expense Report? How to Create One?
One crucial aspect of business finance management is knowing how the money of your organization is being spent. You can’t paint a complete picture of your organization’s financial health without understanding how the money is flowing first. This clarity is precisely what effective expense reports provide. When properly maintained, expense reports give you a clear perspective over your organization's finances.
In this comprehensive guide, we delve into:
- The Definition of Expense Reports: What are they and why are they crucial?
- The Importance of Accurate Expense Reporting: How does it affect your organization's financial health?
- Creating Effective Expense Reports: We'll explore two practical methods to craft accurate and insightful expense reports, empowering you to make informed financial decisions.
What is an expense report?
An expense report is a crucial tool in business finance management. It is a categorized and itemized list of expenses made on behalf of the organization. These reports assist employers or finance teams in determining what money was spent, what was purchased, and how much of the expenditure is eligible for reimbursement.
The purpose of an expense report is to track the expenditures of a business and expense forms should include all purchases necessary to operate a business, such as food, gas, or parking.
It is most commonly used by employees when requesting reimbursement for expenditures.
When expenditure amounts exceed a certain threshold, receipts are usually attached to the form.
Employees are paid the requested amounts after the employer examines their submissions for accuracy and validity.
In this case, the employer will be able to recognize accounting profit and taxable profit based on the reimbursements.
Business expense reports are usually generated on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis to track business spending:
- It is important for a company to maintain monthly and quarterly expense reports to track all of its purchases during that period. The reports are used to determine whether spending within the organization's budget is within its limits and to identify areas for cost reductions.
- Yearly expense reports are in turn used for tax purposes. A company's tax returns are prepared using its annual expense reports.
It is also possible to use expense reports to detail expenditures made against an initial employee advance.
Employers still record employee expenses as business expenses, but they do not reimburse employees; instead, they deduct the expenditures from employee advances.
Why use an expense report?
Expense reports are essential for small businesses, enabling a clear tracking of business expenses often paid out-of-pocket by employees. These reports detail all reimbursable expenses and require attaching receipts for accurate verification. Once reviewed for accuracy, employees are reimbursed accordingly. Additionally, small business owners and accountants use these reports to analyze total expenses over specific periods, employing accounting tools to assess whether costs align with budget expectations
The following are some benefits of generating a expense report:
1. Facilitates efficient expense tracking and cost control
Analyzing expense report data is the ideal starting point for cost control. This allows you to track your firm's spending over time by giving you a clearer picture of what your money is being spent on.
Additionally, you can analyze how much your employees are spending on different expense categories, determine which categories are driving up costs, and implement strategies to reduce or eliminate them. In addition to identifying loopholes in expense policies, these reports can help you decide which vendors to prioritize and which ones to let go by identifying loopholes in expense policies.
Tracking expenses over time allows you to identify whether a particular expense category (such as transportation or hotels) is increasing costs excessively. As a result, you can strategize on how to reduce or eliminate these costs.
2. Helps with budgeting
A business's budget is essential to its smooth operation. A detailed and accurate expense report can help your organization develop a strong and informed financial plan. As a result, various departments and projects can be allocated more appropriate budgets. You can maintain your business's financial security long-term by consistently tracking expenses in order to ensure that different departments and projects adhere to their budgets.
3. Makes for accurate reimbursements
In the event that an employee paid for business expenses out of pocket, they would expect a fair and accurate reimbursement.
Also, you want to make sure that the request is fair so that you don't pay more than you are owed.
It allows organizations to determine if a claim is legitimate faster by providing employees with a standardized process to learn what can and cannot be expensed.
In addition to providing solid evidence of when, where, and how expenses were incurred, itemized expense reports with receipts do the same for proving compliance with your organization's expense policy.
4. Simplifies tax deductions
Tax deductions are available for many business expenses incurred by employees at work. In order to claim expenses as deductions, you must properly record them and provide proof that they were actually incurred.
Business owners sometimes use their bank account or corporate card statements to keep track of their deductible expenses. It's important to keep in mind that these statements may not include all expenses.
In contrast, expense reports simplify the process of keeping track and deducting deductible expenses during tax season. The finance team simply needs to add up all the expenses that can be deducted and enter them into the appropriate tax forms.
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What should be in the expense report?
By creating an expense report, you (or your accountant) can easily add up all expenses so that they can be entered into your tax return.
Some crucial elements to include in an expense report include:
- The name, department, designation, and contact information of the employee who submitted the report.
- The date and amount of each expense (corresponding to the date and amount on the receipt)
- What type of expense is being incurred (meals, mileage, internet, etc.)?
- Vendor or merchant who sold the item
- If applicable, the client or project for which it was purchased
- From your accounting chart, determine the account where the expense should be charged
- A description of each expense in more detail
- Expense subtotals and total costs, including taxes, for each type of expense
- (If applicable) a deduction for prior advances made to the employee
How to create expense reports
Companies most often generate and track expense reports using spreadsheets, templates, or expense reporting software.
You can generate expense reports in two different ways: manually through templates, or through Pluto.
Manual expense reporting with custom templates
To make the task of preparing expense reports easier for employees, some organizations provide customizable, ready-made templates to download and use. To report expenses in this way, follow these steps:
- The employee outlines their name, contact information, designation, the dates covered, and the purpose of the report in the appropriate fields.
- Following that, they determine how many rows and columns the expense report should contain. For example, some firms have mandatory columns and categories that correspond to the expense categories and columns in tax returns.
- In the report, expenses should be listed chronologically with brief descriptions, with the most recent expense appearing at the end.
- In order to calculate the grand total, the employee must first calculate the subtotals for each expense category followed by the total for all expenses. Subtotals assist the finance department in analyzing expenses.
- Finally, all expenses mentioned above must be accompanied by receipts. The receipts can either be scanned or photocopied depending on whether the report is being submitted digitally.
- Reports are submitted to the line manager or department manager for validation and fraud detection.
- As soon as they approve the report, it is forwarded to the finance department for reimbursement.
Automated expense reporting
The use of expense report templates is a quick way to keep track of expenses for small businesses.
The problem arises when your business grows, at which point the process of filling out a report, even if using a template, can become a time-consuming task.
When multiple departments process several expense reports a day, it is important to switch to an automated expense reporting solution like Pluto, so that these reports can be tracked and managed more efficiently.
- Pluto enables employees to create expense reports on the fly. Their receipts need to be captured digitally or filled out in the mandatory fields within the application.
- By grouping all the expense claims together, a report can be created and submitted effortlessly.
- Pluto also provides virtual and physical cards, so the expense data are booked straight into the platform for later use.
- Line managers and department managers review reports to identify policy violations, fraud, duplicate expenses, or warnings about them.
How to simplify the expense reporting process
While expense reports are important when it comes to gaining an overall view of the way money is moving, creating them can be a hassle when your organization incurs too many expenses to keep track of manually.
However, there are a few ways that you can simplify your expense reporting. These include:
Switching to expense reporting software
The first step in expense management is to file expense reports. You must also maintain policy compliance, reimburse expenses on time, and conduct successful expense audits to stay on top of your business expenses.
This is where Pluto can help. By providing multiple ways to record expenses on the go, we eliminate the need for manual data entry and paperwork. You can benefit from an expense management solution by:
- Generating and submitting reports automatically;
- The ability to support multiple expense policies and spend limits;
- Eliminates policy violations and fraudulent expenditures
- Analytical reports and intuitive dashboards increase spend visibility
With all of these features, you can save time and money while keeping your employees productive.
Make expenses easy to report and track
Provide your employees with Pluto real-time reporting system where they can track expenses, submit receipts, and report business expenses.
Business expense reports can be updated in real-time using online or smartphone apps, and receipt images can be added for total transparency, if you use digital technology.
Time-stamping and expense classification make it easy to catch fraud, which is beneficial to both you and your employees.
Embrace mobile devices
By scanning receipts and automatically extracting and reporting the key data, Pluto saves your employees' time and improves their expense reporting accuracy.
It makes perfect sense for you to use an app that allows your employees to track expenses easily from their phones since most (if not all) of your employees spend a lot of time on their smartphones.
Set up a routine audit
Ensure that you also incorporate a routine audit process into your business expense report policies. Your expense report should be audited quarterly, biannually, or annually, depending on the number of expenditures your employees incur.
You can catch fraud cases through audits, but you can also understand where the biggest expenditures are and reduce them.
Routine audits can also help you improve management and tracking of your business expenses by letting you know how to refine your reporting process.
Automated expense reporting with Pluto
Pluto allows you to issue virtual cards and physical cards and that immediately solves two things:
- No need for petty cash or out of pocket expenses;
- Real-time reporting of all the incurred expenses;
The spend management system allows you to issues cards for a particular employee, vendor, or even expense type.
It also allows you to set the limits on the go, and see all the expenses in the real-time report. All that, while your employees can easily categorize the expenses and upload the physical receipts just by taking a photo on their mobile device.
Reporting expenses manually is very time consuming, but having them all digitally stored and automatically reported solves the problem.
Key takeaways
Expense reports are a crucial aspect of the financial bookkeeping of any business organization. Not only are they important for knowing how much money is being spent by the company, whether as a whole or for a specific project, but also for the purpose of reimbursing employees for business-related expenses.
Plus, they also help you with budgeting, tax reporting, and cost control measures.
You can easily create an expense report using a premade or personalized template, but you’ll have a much easier time in the long run if you start using Pluto.
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Vlad Falin
Procure-to-Pay Process: What it is, Benefits, and Steps Involved
The procure-to-pay process doesn’t mean the procurement process. It is a subset of procurement that integrates purchasing and accounts payable.
Traditionally, the procurement process is scattered across the business, and the procurement team needs help to gain visibility or control. The employees purchase from different vendors, the approval process is chaotic and delayed, the stakeholders are stuck in email threads to review the expenses, and the procurement team struggles to get an overview of the organization’s needs.
Procuring the best goods and services becomes problematic since the team is left with open information loops. As a result, it spends more time optimizing the procurement cost and improving the bottom line.
What is the Procure-to-Pay Process?
The procure-to-pay process streamlines the scattered procurement parts to combine purchases and payments. Instead of a process spread across different software, the procurement process shifts to a centralized platform.
The employees get a dedicated platform to raise purchase requests and obtain approvals. The platform notifies stakeholders, such as managers, legal teams, finance teams, IT teams, and other relevant decision-makers to review and approve the proposals. As a result, the procurement team seamlessly moves to the vendor evaluation and negotiation stage without worrying about approvals or delays. The finance team efficiently handles accounts payable since the purchase and payment process is integrated.
So, while earlier, the purchases were handled solely by the procurement team and payments solely by the finance teams, the procure-to-pay process gives both teams an overview of the process from start to finish. In this post, we will discuss how this procure-to-pay process helps you optimize your procurement function and improve your bottom line.
Why Do You Need a Procure-to-Pay Process?
The procure-to-pay process is not just for your finance team or procurement team. It helps the entire organization to gain resources efficiently. Here are eight ways that demonstrate how moving to a streamlined process benefits you:
1. Visibility
All the relevant stakeholders get visibility into the process and the status. Be it the employee, managers, finance team, legal team, IT team, or procurement team — each one can track the progress without delving into multiple email threads. Additionally, teams get insights that help procurement teams optimize costs with data-driven decision-making.
2. Compliance and Control
You can implement advanced controls, such as customized approval workflows and spending budgets, without micromanaging the teams. You can successfully enforce internal control over financial reporting without creating unnecessary team resentment.
So, for instance, if any expenses or purchases beyond $50,000 require additional approval from the legal and IT team, you can easily configure those controls within the approval workflow.
3. Streamline Workflows
The traditional process demands the employees to go from one office to another or spend days on email and Slack conversations before the managers give the green signal. At times, approval of a critical stakeholder is missed, causing delays and disrupting the workflow.
With the procure-to-pay process, you can create custom workflows depending on the purchase category, department, amount, etc. This accelerates workflow, and all the relevant stakeholders get notified right away.
4. Centralized Management
The procure-to-pay process integrates purchases and payments to bring all the critical information on a single dashboard. As a result, any discrepancies in the procurement process are identified in minutes. The entire procedure accelerates the real-time visibility of each stage.
5. Reconciliation
A centralized management system makes collecting and storing documents easy; additionally, since it integrates purchases and payments, the information syncs across accounting systems and ERPs.
During the audit season, this becomes a blessing where the finance team doesn’t have to chase teams for complete records. Also, it becomes easier to store and lock all the transactions and share these records with external parties.
6. Risk Management
The procurement operation is prone to financial, operational, and reputational risks. With the procure-to-pay process, teams can efficiently manage the vendors, purchase requests, approvals, and payments on a centralized platform in real time. It reduces the risk of fraud, ensures policy compliance, and provides visibility into spending patterns without burdening any team.
7. Insights
You can easily see the inside out of your procurement process, whether you want to know how much the marketing team spends or which vendor costs you the most. It makes it more convenient to reduce procurement costs and optimize purchases to improve the bottom line. Also, as all the information is centralized, there are no gaps or missing loopholes, providing complete transparency of your expenses.
8. Invoice Management
The procure-to-pay process ensures that all the invoices are captured and extracted into a centralized platform. This facilitates two-way and three-way matching without causing delays. Moreover, the reconciliation process becomes easy as all the records are systematically recorded.
So, whether you receive an invoice via email, WhatsApp, or physical copy, you can easily add it to the system without risking losing an invoice.
What are the Stages in the Procure-to-Pay Process?
The traditional procurement process has over nine steps strewed across different platforms. These include identifying goods and services, purchase requests, vendor selection, negotiation, purchase orders, inspection of the goods received, three-way matching, approvals, and payment and reconciliation.
While the procure-to-pay process doesn’t alter these stages, it integrates them for a streamlined workflow. So, earlier, if the approvals took days or weeks, keeping employees and the procurement team on hold, now it only takes a few minutes or hours. You centralize the procurement process and save money and time.
Here are five key stages in the procure-to-pay process:
1. Purchase Request
Employees no longer need to travel from one office to another, seeking approvals manually from managers. The streamlined procure-to-pay process gives employees a centralized dashboard to raise requests and specify their needs. It helps the procurement team to understand what the employee needs as well as examine the purchase details. Moreover, the stakeholders can quickly approve or reject the requests from the dedicated platform.
Administrators add customized approval flows to enforce internal policies. They create trigger-based approval workflows based on the expense amount, category, and department to accommodate intricate hierarchies.
For instance, they have the option to create separate workflows for expenses below $5000 and those exceeding a certain budget. Similarly, they can add specific stakeholders to the custom workflows for minimum friction and delay.
2. Purchase Order
While the vendor evaluation, selection, and negotiation happen on dedicated ERPs, the procure-to-pay process enables you to bring all this information on a consolidated platform. You maintain a synced and consistent database to make purchases faster and more secure.
Pluto integrates with your ERPs and allows you to maintain a centralized vendor database. You can add the vendor directly to the platform and systematically record information. You can add a field in your approval workflow to determine whether the employees are purchasing from a vendor list or a new vendor.
A systematic list helps you consolidate expenses and optimize costs. Moreover, ordering becomes more accessible with a unified platform for raising and approving purchase requests and maintaining an ERP-synced vendor database.
3, Invoice Management
Traditionally, vendors send invoices to a dedicated email or an address. The employees send them for approval and payment. It takes days to clear the expenses. Additionally, the accounting team spends considerable time and energy on maintaining records.
The procure-to-pay strategy reduces this effort and streamlines the procedure. It captures and extracts the invoice from the emails and attaches to a dedicated purchase request and order. This helps the teams match the purchase order, invoice and goods received note (GRN) without juggling multiple platforms.
It pulls all the information with optical character recognition (OCR) technology, reducing manual data entry. Since this platform syncs with the accounting system, the accounting team spends minimal time on data entry.
4. Payment Processing
Processing payments becomes a task when the finance team has to chase employees for invoices and wait for approvals and verification. The procure-to-pay technique centralizes the entire process, giving real-time visibility and helping finance teams make timely payments.
Moreover, with Pluto, you can integrate your procurement software with the payment gateways to ease the payment process further. Also, you get better Forex rates than banks, helping you save more money. Overall, with the approvals and invoices streamlined, payment processing becomes easy.
5. Reconciliation
Reconciliation is the hardest part, even when you perform the data entry and data sync monthly. You risk losing documentation and creating gaps in the records.
The procure-to-pay process consolidates the entire procurement cycle to bring all the critical information on a single platform. There are minimal gaps; records are up-to-date due to real-time tracking and recording.
With Pluto, you can integrate with platforms like MS Dynamics, Oracle Netsuite, QuickBooks, etc. So, with your ERPs and accounting software synced, you can easily record all the transactions digitally and securely.
Pluto further enables you to lock the transactions to avoid fraud once approved. Moreover, you can create view-only access for your records to simplify auditing for external parties.
Improve Your Bottom Line With the Right Procure-To-Pay Solution
Overall, the procure-to-pay process helps you automate your procurement process without changing your approach too much. You just need to find the right solution that assists your procurement process.
We discussed more about this in our procure-to-pay solutions post, where you will find what procure-to-pay software does and how to pick the right one.
•
Mohammed Ridwan
PlutoCard is Now GetPluto: Your Unified Payable Solution
PlutoCard now becomes GetPluto — your new one-stop solution for all payables.
What's New?
After much anticipation and hard work, we're excited to announce the migration from plutocard.io to getpluto.com, a step towards redefining corporate payments.
With getpluto.com, we are extending our vision beyond providing corporate cards.
We understand the challenges that businesses face when handling their finances. It involves more than swiping a card and filing expenses. That's why we've developed a comprehensive suite of products and features to simplify everything from procurement to payables.
So, whether you want to streamline purchase requests, integrate your ERP without impacting costs, or manage reimbursements — getpluto.com has you covered!
Beyond Cards: The All-In-One Platform
Here's a glimpse of what Pluto has to offer:
- Procure-to-pay: Streamline your procurement process from purchase requests to invoice matching, all in one place.
- Bill management: Centralize bill management and payments for faster approvals, better vendor relationships, and more accurate two/three-way matching.
- Accounting ERP integrations: Sync seamlessly with major ERPs like Xero, Zoho, QuickBooks, Dynamics, and Netsuite to close your books 10X faster.
- Petty cash management: Digitize cash-in-hand management to eliminate leaks without losing flexibility or visibility.
- T&E reimbursements: Simplify travel and expense reimbursements with unlimited budget-controlled corporate cards and custom approval workflows.
- Corporate cards: Get budget-controlled corporate cards with built-in compliance management — from receipt capture to policy enforcement.
“We have been using Pluto for a few months now, and we literally have everything in one place.”
~ Lee Kersen Mascarenhas, Head of Operations at BloomingBox
From Our CoFounder — Mo Aziz
Pluto's Corporate Cards have been serving the largest businesses in UAE powered by a platform built for companies of all sizes: from small-scale SMEs to businesses with 1000s of employees.
But company spending does not happen just through Corporate Cards…
At Pluto, we believe CFO & Finance teams need a unified, comprehensive platform that solves all types of corporate spending problems end-to-end.
The new Pluto is our step towards this future where UAE businesses get a best-in-class platform, helping manage company spending across Cards, Reimbursements, Invoice Management, Procurement & more.
Join Us At getpluto.com
We're excited about the possibilities that getpluto.com brings.
We understand the importance of this change and are here to support you at every step of the way, offering a more comprehensive platform to meet all your financial needs.
Sign up for a demo or create a free account at getpluto.com today and discover how Pluto simplifies payments for—finance teams, procurement teams, and employees.
Thank you for your continued support!
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Mohammed Ridwan
Top 6 Spend Management Software for Businesses in the UAE (2023)
Managing business spend is a key concern for most companies. The use of spreadsheets, paper receipts, paper vouchers and handwritten notes makes processes inefficient, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. It also reduces the finance team’s visibility over the company’s spend.
The lack of control over spend causes stress within finance teams, who lag behind due to lack of visibility. Moreover, the cash chaos leads to unspoken internal resentment wherein CFOs think that their teams aren’t providing the necessary key financial insights they require.
A spend management platform can solve this problem. But not every software offers the same functionalities and benefits. You need to select the one that has a good UX and in-depth offerings, enables more reporting, is flexible and scalable, integrates with your ERP, supports the complexities of your business, and has robust security. It should also fit into your organizational structure.
To help you choose the most suitable one for your organization, this article will cover the top 7 spend management software to manage your corporate spending.
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What Is Spend Management Software?
A spend management software is a tool that helps manage corporate spend, i.e., all non-payroll expenses. It does this by:
- Simplifying capture, storage, and retrieval of receipts and documents to reduce the risk of misplaced receipts
- Deploying approval workflows to ensure that business spending follows the company's approval hierarchy
- Providing real-time visibility into business expenses, helping to identify any irregularities
- Generating alerts when an expenditure violates company policies
- Automating employee reimbursement processes to reduce delays in employees getting paid
- Maintaining a complete audit log, including spending approvals and changes
- Easily sync with your ERP/accounting tool for streamlined month-end close
- Managing petty cash expenses by tracking and recording small, miscellaneous expenses in real-time
- Facilitating payment capabilities to handle outgoing financial transactions
- Integrating corporate cards for real-time expense tracking and control spending
- Facilitating procurement processes for the purchase of goods and services
- Handling invoice management to ensure timely payment and record-keeping to foster healthy vendor relations
Hence, spend management software provides financial visibility and control.
Top 7 Spend Management Software
These are the top 7 spend management software to consider:
1.Pluto
Pluto is a spend management platform for enterprises that transforms your finance processes with automation to provide more visibility and control. It brings together the spenders, savers, and sourcers of your business to offer a complete revolution from a chaotic spend management system to a seamless collaborative workflow. It is the fastest way to manage your finances, including account payables and employee reimbursement.
Key Features:
- Custom approval workflows that adapt to the company's hierarchy for timely and accurate approvals
- Facilitate intricate multi-layer workflows to adapt to complex hierarchies to support seamless purchase requests and automate purchase orders
- Unlimited corporate cards with budget controls to maintain expenses within corporate policies
- Offers zero-balance cards, which get funded once the expense is approved.
- Card-specific policies to make branch & subsidiary-level reimbursements easy
- Ability to add comments and document the conversation along with other transaction details to maintain a comprehensive audit log
- View-only access available for external accountants to review financial data without making changes
- Automated receipt capture through OCR, with the ability to support bulk upload via WhatsApp and emails
- Alerts in case of duplicate receipt uploads to avoid fraud and compliance issues
- Custom expense reports to overview business expenses and spending trends
- Integration with accounting platforms like Netsuite for advanced general ledger (GL) coding, tax tracking, vendor syncing, etc.
- Secure document storage with a 5-year audit log and bank-grade encryption
Pricing:
Pros:
- Enables branch & subsidiary-level spend tracking (not offered by other platforms)
- WhatsApp integration to make receipt upload easy
- Offers up to 2% cashback on all non-AED transactions
- Independent PCI DSS Level 1 Certification
Cons:
- Slightly longer on-boarding due to corporate card offering
- Integrates with all other major ERPs except Tally
2.Procurify
Procurify simplifies spend management by accelerating the approval and reconciliation process. It helps to track the business spending with real-time tracking and breaking down data silos. With a core focus on simplifying invoice payments and management, it helps businesses in vendor and spend management.
Key Features:
- Ability to approve requests based on attached receipts and leave comments for clarification
- Custom budgets for different departments or projects
- OCR to auto-extract invoice data with a dedicated centralized invoice box and automatic matching with purchase orders
- Detailed reports based on different departments, categories, or other relevant parameters
- Tailored expense request forms to capture specific information relevant to the organization's needs
- Compatibility with multiple currencies, streamlining international expenses
- Storage of all expense-related documents, including receipts, invoices, and expense reports
- Integration with ERP to sync expense data
Pricing:
It has standard all-in-one pricing of $2000/month. But custom pricing quotes are provided for add-ons like more users, more domains, NetSuite integration, on-premise training, implementation services, and on-premise hybrid implementation.
Pros:
- Easy to make amendments, for instance, to invoice amounts, which helps when raising a PO before receiving the invoice
- Responsive support team when handling technical issues
Cons:
- Does not offer corporate cards in UAE
- Only supports procurement based spending
- Poor reporting capabilities—lacks functionality
3. Spendesk
Spendesk combines approvals, corporate cards, expense reimbursements, and invoice management to automate the spend management process. Specifically designed for finance teams, it offers real-time expense tracking and offers custom workflows for complete control. By consolidating all payments, it provides a spend management solution that enhances financial transparency.
Key Features:
- 100% digital expense reports
- OCR technology to capture and extract key details from receipts
- Expense claim history, available anytime, anywhere, for quick and accurate reporting
- A mobile app for quick reimbursement requests by snapping a photo of receipts
- Real-time expense monitoring to spot errors and missing receipts and stay compliant
- Automates categorization of expenses and VAT account
- Detects duplicate invoices and errors to support three-way matching
- Tracks all purchase orders and invoices with the ability to schedule payments
Pricing:
Request the sales team for a custom quote. A free trial is available.
Pros:
- Single purchases are straightforward and simple
- Easy to integrate with an SSO provider, making login easy and secure for users
- Handy drag-and-drop receipt functionality
Cons:
- Virtual cards are glitchy, with merchants rejecting transactions that have already gone through
- Some basic features are not included in the basic option where they should have been (i.e., memorizing accounting patterns for vendors).
- Corporate cards have defects (especially for travel expenses)
4. Airbase
Airbase simplifies expense reporting with AI and ML. It ensures quick, hassle-free, and smart corporate expense management. It is an automation solution for SMBs and large enterprises. It packages various modules such as AP automation and corporate cards to ease the spend management process for accounting teams and employees.
Key Features:
- OCR to populate details, including GL category, date, amount, and purpose
- Ensures compliance by sending reminders and, if needed, locking cards until policies are met
- Reminders to upload receipts, eliminating the need to chase employees for receipts
- Custom approval workflows and budget limits for physical cards
- Real-time alerts for suspicious activity, enabling quick responses to potential fraudulent purchases
- Supports onboarding with a self-service vendor portal and custom questionnaires
- Facilitates payments and approvals, including multi-subsidiary support, international currency, and real-time GL sync
- Real-time audit trail with receipts, notes, and documentation for transparency.
Pricing:
Request the sales team for a custom quote.
Pros:
- Intuitive and easy to use; no training or previous knowledge required
- Seamless approval workflows
Cons:
- Poor reporting capabilities
- The mobile app is slow and takes time to load pages
- SSO-based login sometimes takes a few tries
- Not suitable for complex branch-level approvals and expenses
5. Coupa
Coupa is a cloud-based automation platform to manage business spending, ranging from procurement to expense management. It facilitates supply chain optimization by providing visibility and control. It streamlines expenses, reduces risk, and ensures compliance by automating reporting, simplifying reimbursements, and offering mobile tracking.
Key Features:
- Offers virtual payment cards for pre-approved expenses, speeding up the reconciliation
- OCR technology and integration with accounting software eliminates manual data entry
- Provides expense reports with intelligent algorithms to prevent fraud and ensure compliance
- A centralized view of all expense spending, enabling accurate assessment
- Enables visibility and control over travel expenses before they occur, ensuring budget control
- Simplifies procurement by offering a centralized area for comparing items from various suppliers and managing punchouts and hosted catalogs
- Provides real-time visibility into purchase orders, order lifecycle, and order line availability
- SmarterTrip feature to automate expense tracking based on the user's location, including mileage and receipt capture
Pricing:
Request the sales team for a custom quote.
Pros:
- Several categories and filters in the analytics section to streamline data
- Chat option enables approver and claimant to discuss issues with receipts
- Enables setting up of customized approval chains and including additional new approvers
Cons:
- Lots of unnecessary notifications, making it difficult to select the ones that need action or comment
- Low receipt searchability, making retrieval time-consuming
- Inconsistent syncing of remit-to address from NetSuite
- Complex to implement and not intuitive, forcing admins to spend more time resolving employees' queries
- Slow customer service
- Very expensive
6.BILL
BILL simplifies expense tracking by providing real-time visibility and customization to manage expenses. It is a spend management solution for SMBs to control payables, receivables expenses, and all corporate expenses. It allows businesses to combine a scattered spend management process into a single platform with seamless syncing.
Key Features:
- Provides credit limits ranging from $500 to $5 million to control spending within constraints
- Makes it easier to monitor spending with real-time visibility into the business finances
- Custom approval workflows to speed up the approval process with minimal friction
- Multiple payment options, including ACH, credit card, check, international wire transfers
- Automates purchase order workflows with the ability to sync and automate two-way matching and three-way matching
- Ability to do quick coding and sync with accounting systems to streamline expense reconciliation
- Enables automated receipt matching, categorization, and expense reporting, reducing administrative workload
- Offers security features, including the ability to freeze and create corporate cards instantly
- Notifies administrators of each employee's transactions, ensuring timely oversight
Pricing:
Bill provides a free trial and essentials pack starting at $45 for six standard user roles. Its team and corporate pack are for $55 and $79, respectively. Enterprises need to request a custom quote.
Pros:
- One-click swift payments
- Minimum training required
- Easy-to-use mobile app
Cons:
- Customer support is difficult to initiate, slow, and unresponsive
- Frequent changes in the interface create confusion for users
How to Choose the Right Spend Management Software
To pick the right software, understand your organization's unique needs.
- What are your goals—cutting costs, enhancing compliance, or making expense processing more efficient?
- What issues do you face with expenses now—a time-consuming process, too many errors, or poor vendor relationships?
- How many employees will use the software, and should it be scalable to accommodate future hires?
- Do you have specific industry rules or in-house policies the software must follow?
Consider these eight factors:
Ease of Use
The software should require minimal training or support with a not-too-steep learning curve. Admins shouldn’t have to spend hours training their employees.
Automation
Choose software with features like automated approval workflows, expense categorization, and notifications. This will improve not only visibility but also accuracy and speed. You will have complete control over finances without having to do tedious manual tasks.
Security
Pick software that complies with security and is certified. It should provide data encryption, role-based access control, and regular security updates.
ERP Integration
The software should integrate with existing financial and accounting systems. This provides a unified view of your financial data without any disruptions. You shouldn’t have to sync data from multiple sources, which can add up to the manual tasks.
Document Capture and Retrieval
Pick a software that has simple document capture and retrieval capabilities. Attaching or retrieving receipts, invoices, and other relevant documents should not take more than a minute. OCR-based software that detects the information to auto-populate expense reports is better than that requiring manual entry.
Budget Control
Select software that enables specifying budgets for different projects, departments, or expense categories. It should be able to monitor the set budgets and raise alerts in case of breach. It should also allow you to modify these budgets at your discretion, ensuring funds reach the right place at the right time.
Multiple Payment Options
The software should allow you to configure custom payment options to suit your business needs. This includes credit cards, ACH, or other payment methods.
Scalability and Flexibility
Select software that can accommodate increased usage for growing businesses. It must also be flexible enough to adapt to changing needs, such as new expense categories, compliance requirements, and organizational structures.
The Spend Management Solution for Your Team
Investing in a spend management tool like Pluto is a smart decision that can improve your financial visibility. From set-up to integration and managing intricate workflows, Pluto handles all aspects of spend management.
- It seamlessly integrates with your current processes, ensuring a smooth transition.
- It offers flexibility to handle complex operations, catering to the needs of both small and large teams.
- Its automation capabilities reduce manual tasks and enhance accuracy for better expense management.
Pluto is the only independently audited PCI DSS Level 1 provider in the UAE, ensuring the highest security standards for enterprises.
Pluto offers a spend management tool that adapts to your evolving needs and provides freedom from financial chaos.
If you want to see how Pluto can transform your spend management into a simpler process, book a demo today.
© Pluto Card is a Pluto Financial Services Inc. company 2024
The product and services mentioned on this webpage belong to Pluto Technologies Ltd (Pluto), a company incorporated under the laws of Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), Dubai holding commercial license number CL5294. Pluto is a financial technology provider and not a bank. Pluto provides certain facilities for the utilization of payment services through Nymcard Payment Services LLC under the applicable payment network and Bank Identification Number Sponsorship of Mashreq Bank PSC. This is pursuant to the license by Visa® Inc and is available for the residents of UAE subject to Terms and Conditions of use