Which Spend Management Platform Is Right for Your Business?

There’s an app for everything in today’s world and so often it’s difficult to find the one that’s just the right fit for your needs. Some apps may not offer enough features and you may find yourself using multiple platforms when there’s actually one app out there that could satisfy all your needs. Conversely, you may be frustrated using a large app suite that’s way more complex and expensive than another more specialized platform that suits your single need. This certainly applies to the plethora of apps available in the Spend Management Accounting universe.  MATAX has created a guide that will help you select the right Spend Management app for your business.

Airbase

If you’re looking for a comprehensive centralized bookkeeping hub to manage your company card spend, employee reimbursements, bill pay, and recognize prepaid & accrued expenses, Airbase is the app for you. In our opinion, it is the most comprehensive spend management and bill pay platform all while being incredibly user-friendly. You can bundle all of the services or pick only the ones you need à la carte. If you are processing a low number of bills and transactional volume, Airbase even offers a free version of their platform.

Brex

Brex is an excellent corporate card and spend management platform that also offers bill pay functionality. Their integration with the accounting app Xero is very speedy and reliable. The entire interface is quite similar to Airbase, but with fewer features (spend control rules are less robust, there is no automatic prepaid & accrued recognition function, & the employee reimbursements module is still in beta testing). In general, Brex will cost less than Airbase at $49 per month with no minimum spend needed on corporate cards either. This makes Brex a great fit for anyone that may be looking to switch from a traditional company credit card and doesn’t require high detail in their spending controls.

Bill.com

If you’re looking simply for a platform to manage your bill payments with no plans of needing other services like employee expense claims or corporate card controls, Bill.com may be the app for you. Bill.com has a great two-way sync with Xero - so if you create a bill in Xero, it will sync to Bill.com to be paid, or if you create a bill in Bill.com, it will sync to Xero. Bill.com also allows you to pay your vendor bills via credit card - so you can receive credit card rewards on bills to vendors that otherwise don’t accept credit cards. If you are required to amortize your prepaid & accrued expenses though, you may want to consider Airbase for bill pay as it can automate this step of recognizing your amortized bills.

Additionally, Bill.com acquired the spend management corporate card platform Divvy in 2021. The additional services Divvy offers are much like Airbase, but presently Divvy does not integrate with several major accounting platforms including Xero which could greatly increase the manual time spent managing your books.

Veem

Veem is another solid choice if you only require bill payments for your app stack. Its integration with accounting platforms is a little less robust than Bill.com & Airbase. Veem does not charge any fees for domestic payments & offers international payments at competitive exchange rates. This makes Veem a fantastic option for anyone looking to reduce their accounting integration software fees & bank service charges.

Expensify

Expensify has long been recognized as one of the top apps for managing employee expense claims. They do a great job at this by enforcing policy controls and creating employee expense reports that sync to your accounting platform as bills that you can pay directly to your employees through Expensify’s portal. Expensify does support multiple reimbursement policies (such as by department) and other complex approval workflows. In our opinion, as your reimbursement needs get more layered and larger, Airbase does a better job of simplifying the process and is more user-friendly for complex workflows. 

Expensify also offers a company card or policy controls for existing company cards. The accounting platform integration for their company card is fairly weak though and often requires a lot of manual intervention from the bookkeeping team. As a result, we’d recommend that you look towards Airbase or Brex if you also require company card controls in your app stack.

Reach out to us for demos of these apps or additional info about discounts and extended trials.