Expense Management

Finding the Best Expense Tracking App for Your Business

Staying on top of expenses and having visibility into corporate spend can be one of the biggest challenges to your business. While far from a walk in the park, making sure your team keeps track of receipts and expenditures, files expense reports in a timely manner, and properly allocates purchases is essential for accurate operations and budget forecasting. Fortunately, business expense tracking apps are available to not only make it easier for your employees, but also help improve visibility into company spend and can help reduce costs.

However, finding a good business expense tracking app is hard! You need to consider what features are essential for your company, pricing, implementation, and ease of adoption across your organization.

What is an Expense Tracking App

Let’s start with the basics. Business expense tracking apps are reporting tools that assist in streamlining finances by simplifying expense documentation, receipt capture process, reporting, and approvals.

How Does an Expense Tracking App Work?

A business expense tracking app allows for the upload of receipts, as well as expense and mileage recording. Typically the tracking technology is available in both mobile and desktop versions, and enables employees to capture receipts and track expenses on-the-go. The technology then organizes the data and transforms it into reports that can be saved, sent for approvals, or analyzed by finance teams.

TravelBank, for instance, offers an intuitive app that manages business expenses and travel needs. Your team can capture receipts on-the-go and we’ll automatically scan them into expenses. You may also invite managers to automate approvals and reimbursement, or simply use it as a business expense tracker for tax purposes.

What Features Should a Business Expense Tracking App Have?

If you have yet to implement a business expense tracking app, or are looking to change providers, it’s important to understand the available features and review the strengths and weaknesses of what is available in the market today.

Here are the nine top features your business expense app evaluation team should think about:

For an in-depth review of features for your evaluation committee to consider when looking into an expense tracking app and other tips, check out our post, Making the Leap to Managed Travel: Buying Process Considerations.

In the meantime, here’s a quick comparison of the strengths and weaknesses for some of the most popular expense management options on the market today for small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs).

Microsoft Excel

Strengths. Excel is the lowest cost option available, but it requires a good amount of manual lift. It is still leveraged by SMBs that don’t want to spend money on an expense management tool.

Weaknesses. While the spreadsheets can be customized, they leave lots of room for human error thanks to the manual data entry component. Due to the inability to put in controls; poor policy compliances and additional work for the finance team is an absolute weakness.

TravelBank Advantage. In comparison, TravelBank integrates expense and travel policies into one platform and makes it easy to keep guidelines current and ensure employee compliance. Finance teams benefit from more accurate data and reconciliation thanks to features like general ledger sync, and due to the user-friendly platform, expense submission is more timely and accurate. Additionally there are time and cost savings associated with automation of expense reporting.

Expensify

Strengths. Expensify offers a user-friendly platform with an in-house corporate card to simplify policy compliance and reconciliations. The receipt scanning portion of the app is very accurate and it integrates with accounting, human resource management systems, and travel platforms.

Weaknesses. Expensify is known for its poor customer support, a very light touch account management team, and aggressively pushing their corporate card on its customers. For non-card users, the pricing is very high. Additionally, it does not offer a travel management component and relies on integrations with other managed travel companies.

TravelBank Advantage. TravelBank offers a clear advantage over Expensify. First, TravelBank works with all company cards, not just one, and customers aren’t penalized for not using a certain card. Second, and most importantly, we offer an all-in-one travel and expense management solution, not just expense management. This allows you to roll-out a single platform to capture expenses and book travel to your team, and wrap policies directly into the tool to enhance compliance.

SAP Concur

Strengths. SAP Concur has a large market presence and is well known by finance leaders for its strong reporting, reconciliation tools, and enhanced features for admins. Concur also provides a decent integration between its travel and expense platforms.

Weaknesses. Concur is known for its sub-par customer support, extremely high price point for small-to-midsize businesses, antiquated technology and app, and slow implementation.

TravelBank Advantage. TravelBank can deliver the key functionality needed by SMBs, but at a fraction of Concur’s price tag. We provide personalized onboarding, fantastic chat support, and a seamless sales and implementation process. Our ability to rapidly change policy and workflows is a user favorite and our customers know they are getting an industry-leading travel and expense management tool.

The TravelBank Difference

If you are looking to have better control over your travel and expense management, improve adoption and compliance through a superior user experience, all while saving significant time through automated accounting processes, we’ve got a solution for you.

TravelBank’s customers enjoy the benefits of the first all-in-one natively built travel, expense, and virtual card solution for SMBs across three platforms (Web, iOS, and Android). In addition to a unique rewards program that drives up to 30% cost savings, TravelBank offers a one-stop-shop for T&E management, and strong integrations with HR systems, employee resource planning software, and general ledger tools to reduce manual entry.

Ready to learn more? Check out our Expense Buyer’s Guide.

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