Control, visibility, compliance, and documentation are provided by spend management software to pay businesses in reducing expenses, avoiding wasteful spending, and paying vendors or employees on time. Businesses set aside budgets for activities, including insurance, capital equipment, and inventory replenishment. On the other hand, budget leaks harm your company’s profit margins when spending goes unchecked. Moreover, similar difficulties will increase in bulk when the business grows, putting your organization’s profitability at risk. As a result, businesses of all sizes use a spend management tool to track how much money is being spent and to keep it within the company budget.
What Exactly Is Spend Management?
The practice of tracking all business purchases and supplier payments is known as spend management. The basic aim is to account for every money that leaves the company account and receive the best possible value. Spend management policies should automate and integrate all spend-related activities from source to vendor payment. Such granularity should guarantee that procurement proceeds as anticipated by business stakeholders. In addition, the contract compliance procedure ensures payment to vendors, contractors, and other third parties.
Spend Management Importance
Standard spend management activities provide the following benefits:
1 – Increased business efficiency by automating spend and expense tracking operations that are error-prone and time-consuming when performed by employees.
2 – Lower risks and costs since the tool informs you about the goods being acquired, the vendor’s identity, and the cost of the procurement.
3 – Using a standard spend management procedure in conjunction with a digital app may improve collaboration between business resources and third parties.
4 – Long-term productivity gains by freeing employees from routine chores and allowing them to do things that generate income for your company.
The following are the best spend management tools for bringing all spending under your control and getting the most bang for your buck:
10+ Best Spend Management Software You Can Use
Spend Management Software you can use in 2022.
1. Spendesk
Spendesk includes several useful and user-friendly features, such as integrations and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Your company may use this tool to automate all regular expenses. It is strong enough to match expense claims to the appropriate invoice, saving time. Spendesk is a versatile tool that allows companies to tailor it to their spend management strategies. For example, you may provide each employee with a debit card for particular spending. In addition, you may create virtual credit cards for single-use applications. It offers to push alerts for payment confirmation, an accounting tool connection, a point-in-time summary of expenses, and a full spend overview dashboard.
2. Airbase
Airbase is a complete spend management tool for various businesses, including early-stage businesses, small businesses, mid-market companies, pre-IPO firms, and enterprises. It offers a wide range of comprehensive spend management, auditing, and supervision solutions. For example, the Receipt Management module offers compliance enforcement, easy receipt attachment, dedicated emails, sharing receipts from another device, and so forth. In addition, a Security and Fraud Detection module allows for card management, card restrictions, card blocking, fraud detection, fraud notification, encrypted exchange of virtual card data, and other features.
3. Emburse
Emburse offers comprehensive spending management tools for startups to large multinational companies. Its solutions and expenses include expense management, accounts payable, buying automation, a simplified payment system, audit, trip management, and data dashboards. In addition, Emburse offers virtual cards that may be issued directly from its site using a tool called Emburse Spend. Emburse’s virtual cards integrate smoothly with accounting and AP software, such as Emburse Chrome River, Emburse Certify, or one of the other solutions available. Products like Emburse Go assist travel managers in keeping track of their passengers and expenses. Emburse’s modular approach to business spend management is the best feature, which adapts to the company’s size. Emburse Tallie is an excellent choice for small to medium-sized businesses. The Emburse Certify is ideal for businesses situated in the United States. Emburse Chrome River is ideal for big organizations with activities independent of location. Emburse’s software is used by major corporations such as Microsoft, Nike, and Estee Lauder.”
4. Coupa
Coupa is another prominent cloud-based business spend management (BSM) tool. It can manage spending across several business verticals such as payments, supply chains, procurement, treasury, etc. There are three layers of tools for easy spend management. The Applications tool stack is the first. This stack includes all of the necessary modules such as procure, invoice, contract management, strategic sourcing, expense, pay, spend analysis, and so on. The BSM platform, which focuses on user privacy, profile, data security, and integrations, is the second stack. It comprises a linked core, cloud access, integrations, a graphical user interface (GUI), and other features. The third layer is the Coupa business community. It offers features such as an open business network, Coupa advantage, and community AI.
5. Ramp
Ramp has separated its business spend management system into four giant modules: Start, Scale, Streamline, and Save. The Start module offers you access to tools for managing multiple cards, bill payments (ACH/checks/cards), real-time expense monitoring, and precise spend accounting. The Scale module allows you to impose business policies on spending and expenses. You may, for example, use expense policies to establish regulations and spend controls to enforce these spending restrictions. The Streamline module offers many processes (Onboarding, Collaboration, and Accounting) to automate spend management and integrate it with other business tools (1000+ integrations). Finally, the Save module is available to meet your requirements for receipt matching, expense classification, pricing intelligence, savings insights, and so forth.
6. Mesh Payments
Mesh Payments is yet another piece of software that can help you stop spending leaks. To begin, its Spend Insights capability provides vital data insights just when you need them. For example, when you see a spending item, the mobile app immediately displays future savings chances, spend projections at the current rate, and so on. Second, its Spend Controls module provides real-time payment request notifications, allows you to control spending, cancel subscriptions from a single interface, and stop vendor payments with a single click. Spend Optimization, Real-Time Reporting, and Automated Payment Workflow are further significant features.
7. Workday
Workday, the well-known human capital management tool, has also begun to provide easy and smart solutions to manage business expenditures. It has an easy, intuitive, and lightweight graphical user interface, enabling spend management from a single centralized platform. Its user interface is divided into three sections: source to pay, inventory, and KPIs. The Source to Pay module provides insightful data on Supplier Spends, Managed vs. Unmanaged Spend, Supplier Performance, Invoice Processing, and so on. In addition, since it is a cloud-based app, you and your business stakeholders may monitor company spending from any device and location with an internet connection.
8. Brex
It is about financial accelerating business operations while adhering to company spending and expense policies. Brex fosters a culture of financial discipline within the company and its human resources by allowing employees to report correct expenses and the accounting team to audit them easily. Brex presently offers a variety of company expense management solutions such as credit cards, business accounts, expense tracking, integrations, and so on. In addition, it includes the Brex Empower subscription’s spend management feature.
9. Teampay
Teampay’s cloud-based app controls finance teams, allowing them to see your company’s spending across all verticals. Company stakeholders receive a real-time snapshot of daily spending and may set fast spending limits if necessary. It offers a conversational user interface so that employees may receive real-time support from the finance team to understand the purchasing process or get transaction approvals. You don’t have to wait until the following month’s payment to see how much your employees spend. You’ll receive real-time spending information.
10. PayEm
PayEm is all about sophisticated automation in your business’s spend management sector. It consolidates vendor subscriptions and SaaS subscriptions for employees. As a result, you won’t need to purchase separate software for each spend head. PayEm allows you to create and issue virtual credit cards for various third-party vendors and designate a point of contact for spend management. A similar method may be used for software subscriptions. PayEm gives you complete spend management. Thus, by deleting unneeded apps or former employee accounts from current apps, you may avoid overpaying on software subscriptions.
11. RealPage
You can become more cost-effective and productive when you use RealPage to handle vendors, invoices, and purchases. It’s more than simply a spending tool. RealPage collects spending and revenue data from your company’s business portfolios and offers analytical insights for smart procurement. It enables you to automate all purchase orders (POs) and associated approval procedures by delivering real-time data to a unified dashboard for spending supervision and analysis.
12. JAGGAER ONE
JAGGAER ONE is also a common moniker for Source-to-Pay activities, consolidating all spending from several verticals into a single place for simple oversight of company spending. Its well-designed app allows you to manage indirect and direct expenses with a single tool. In addition, merging AI and Robotic Process Automation offers very sophisticated data analytics and insights (RPA). As a result, you may get actionable data to reorganize the spend management process, such as building a procurement catalog for the whole business.
13. Concur Expense
Concur Expense is a spend management solution provided by SAP, a well-known business operations ERP software developer. By connecting various Source-to-Pay transactions, the software enables you to integrate and automate business spend management. As a result, the tool is advantageous to both the employee and the business. Field employees, for example, may submit expense vouchers from their mobile devices. Concur’s a sophisticated program that will automatically check the expense and notify you so that you may approve the spend more quickly.
Conclusion: Spend Management Software
Using spend management software, you may seal the holes that unwittingly drain money and cushion your company’s profit margin.
