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“Have I paid that vendor yet?” you ask yourself as you sort through the dozens of invoices you’ve received this month. Definitely not the way you wanted to spend your Friday afternoon.
As your small business grows, manually managing accounts payable (AP) processes becomes more challenging, time-consuming and error-prone.
Enter accounts payable software. These platforms can automate processes like invoice management and payment processing while syncing to your accounting software to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
This article offers an overview of the six best accounts payable software solutions for small businesses so you can find just the right platform for your needs. We’ll also give you a list of the features you should look for when choosing a platform, plus tips for how to make your decision.*
Financial admin eating up too much of your time? We can take it off your plate
Automate your accounts payable processes with Juni and free up your day for more impactful work.
*The information about all the platforms discussed in this article was collected between 9 January 2024 and 11 January 2024. This article was written and approved by Juni and is intended as marketing material.
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Whenever you’re researching software, whether that be an accounts payable solution or inventory management platform, you need to be clear on what functionalities your business needs. So before we get into our list, here are some features you should prioritise when selecting accounts payable software:
Let’s take an in-depth look at our list of software. For each platform, we’ll list its features (as well as its limitations), explain how pricing works and point out what kind of business it’s best fit for.
Juni’s platform for ecommerce entrepreneurs comes with automated accounts payable features that can help you run simpler, tighter and more accurate financial admin. With Juni, it takes just seconds to auto-collect, pay and even finance your invoices.
By collecting and scanning your invoices automatically, then pre-filling all the important payment details, Juni saves you time and reduces the risk of human error. You can also automatically import your receipts and invoices with your dedicated Juni inbox for effortless spend management, plus match receipts to transactions.
What’s more, if you need to reduce pressure on your cash flow cycles, Juni offers financing options for certain types of payments, giving you up to 120 days to pay.*
The platform goes beyond accounts payable features, also offering business accounts and cards, features to optimise cash flow management, powerful accounting automations, fast transfers and storefront integrations.
Most suitable for: Ecommerce entrepreneurs and small businesses
Juni has two plan options:
You can try our Scale plan for free for the first 30 days.
Based in Copenhagen, Pleo is a business spending solution with built-in AP automation software. Pleo’s invoice management features make it easy to capture, process, approve, pay and bookkeep invoices in a central location. With over 50 supported currencies, Pleo users can seamlessly pay vendors across the world.
Most suitable for: Companies that need to pay invoices in several currencies
Pleo has three plan options:
Spendesk is a spend management platform with accounts payable features like invoice automation and approval workflows, giving you greater control over the invoicing lifecycle and your AP processes. By using Spendesk, you can minimise (or eliminate) manual data entry for your invoicing processes, plus get real-time insights into your spending patterns.
Most suitable for: SaaS, tech and fintech companies
Spendesk doesn’t list its pricing options, so you’ll have to reach out to sales to get a quote
Sage Intacct’s cloud-based invoicing software helps small business owners and finance teams automate invoice management with the power of AI. For example, simply upload or email an invoice, and the software will automatically extract details and populate fields for your approval. The platform can also detect duplicate invoices, helping you stay in control of your expenses and avoid costly errors.
Most suitable for: Businesses that need powerful analytics tools
Sage Intacct has three plans for its accounts payable software. All plans come with three months free:
While SAP Concur isn’t specifically designed for small businesses, it’s still a good fit for solopreneurs and SMBs looking to automate their AP processes. The platform automates invoicing processes, meaning you can pay suppliers quickly without constantly having to double-check invoices and complete transactions yourself.
Most suitable for: Businesses with immediate plans to scale
SAP Concur doesn’t list its pricing options, so you’ll have to reach out to sales to get a quote.
Visma is the parent organisation for a number of accounting and invoicing solutions across Europe. It has designated products for 15 different EU countries, such as Visma eKonomi, its designated Swedish accounting platform. Visma eKonomi has basic AP features for paying vendors, but it has a range of other accounting features that can help you streamline your financial admin as a whole.
Most suitable for: Small businesses in Sweden
Visma platform prices range depending on which country you operate in and the Visma product you select. Visma eEkonomi has three plans that come with supplier invoicing features:
You can have all the software comparison guides in the world available to you, but if you aren’t intentional about your decision, you may end up choosing software that falls short for your needs. Here are a few steps you can take to help you make the right decision when selecting an accounts payable platform for your small business.
By digitising the traditionally paper-intensive process of handling invoices and payments, AP software is not only more efficient than manual processes, but also minimises the possibility of errors, like a missed or incorrect payment. Having more visibility over invoices, due dates and your general spending patterns can help you maintain tighter control over your financial operations.
But to get the most out of a platform, you need to make sure you’re choosing the right one for your needs. For example, if you run an online storefront, you’ll want to choose a solution like Juni that has the specific needs of ecommerce entrepreneurs in mind.
By choosing a software solution that’s a good fit for you, you’ll make your business more agile, resilient and competitive. Meanwhile, you’ll get back more time in the day to focus on what you most love about running your company, whether that’s marketing your product, interacting with customers or finding ways to scale.
Financial admin eating up too much of your time? We can take it off your plate
Automate your accounts payable processes with Juni and free up your day for more impactful work.
*Juni Invoices is available for EU-based companies only. Media financing is available for companies registered in NL, SE, DE, FR, ES, IT, FI and NO, upon eligibility. Fees and terms and conditions apply. Click here for more details.
Accounts payable automation software helps businesses manage and track the money they owe to suppliers, vendors and other parties. Essentially, this type of software helps business owners and finance departments handle their payment processes by recording invoices, tracking due dates and organising information.
While you can manually manage your accounts payable process, this approach can be time-consuming and error-prone. A better way to keep track of accounts payable is by using specialised accounts payable software that tracks and pays your invoices for you.
You can automate accounts payable processes by using specialised software. These platforms handle a number of tasks, including:
"Only six more to go," you tell yourself as you upload yet another receipt to your accounting software. We all know the pain of searching for receipts across emails and platforms and trying to match them to expenses.
This becomes even more challenging the larger your business becomes and the more vendors you have to pay. You can avoid most of that frustration and wasted time with the right spend management software.
But not all spend management platforms will be a good fit for your business. For example, digital commerce companies need solutions that take into account sector-specific expenses like ad receipts and multiple platform payments, while small businesses need tools that simplify their financial admin, not complicate it.
This article takes a look at the six best spend management software solutions so you can find just the right platform for your needs. We’ll also give you a list of the features you should look for when choosing a platform, plus tips for how to make your decision.*
Spend less time on spend management
With real-time spend overviews, receipt matching automation and powerful integrations, Juni will make you forget what a hassle managing your expenses used to be.
*The information about all the platforms discussed in this article was collected between 17 January 2024 and 19 January 2024. This article was written and approved by Juni and is intended as marketing material.
Before taking a closer look at the tools on our list, here are six features your spend management software (also known as expense management software) should come with:
Bonus: Look out for spend management platforms that come with built-in accounts payable and invoice automation features, which will help you centralise your financial admin and save time.
Now, let's explore the solutions on our list in depth. For each platform, we’ll list its key features (as well as its limitations), explain how pricing works and point out what kind of business it’s best fit for.
Juni helps businesses in digital commerce manage their cash flow, track their expenses and optimise their profits with features that are specifically designed with ecommerce companies in mind.
While it’s not specifically expense management software, you can use the platform for your spend management needs. Juni's goal is to give everyone in digital commerce, from the CFO to the accounting team to marketing managers, everything they need to focus on business growth.
Juni’s expense management features are especially valuable for users who have multiple receipts coming from different media buying channels and online transactions. With Meta and Google Ads integrations, plus powerful receipt matching, expense management suddenly becomes easy. On top of that, you can also manage your unpaid invoices and accounts payable processes within Juni, bringing your financial admin under one roof.
All of this comes with easy access to media and inventory financing for up to 2 million EUR, helping you free up your cash flow and grow your business.*
*Juni Invoices is available for EU-based companies only. Media financing is available for companies registered in NL, SE, DE, FR, ES, IT, FI and NO, upon eligibility. Fees and terms and conditions apply. Click here for more details.
Most suitable for: SMBs and mid-market companies in digital commerce
Juni has two plan options:
SAP Concur helps you streamline processes to deliver efficiency savings, with a focus on eliminating manual data entry, lost receipts and unclaimed VAT refunds. As such, it’s best suited to larger organisations. The platform helps you reduce the risk of human error and compliance issues with automations, plus the software can identify potential mistakes and discrepancies in real-time.
Most suitable for: Larger and enterprise organisations
SAP Concur doesn’t list its pricing options, so you’ll have to reach out to sales to get a quote.
Zoho Expense is the business expense tracking app from the Zoho suite of business tools, which means it integrates with Zoho’s other financial management apps. It’s a reasonably priced platform suited to handling all aspects of expense management and reporting for SMBs. Zoho Expense automatically records expenses from receipts, simplifying and automating the expense reporting process.
Most suitable for: People already using other Zoho products (namely Zoho Books)
Zoho Expense has three plans for its spend management software:
Expensify is a spend management solution for keeping track of business expenses on the go. Most of the expense management functionality can be done on your phone, while a series of handy integrations help to automate and streamline processes around uploading and allocating receipts. Plus, it’s easy for employees to create and submit expense reports for quick reimbursement.
Most suitable for: Small businesses with lots of employee expenses
Expensify has two plans:
One of the many features of smart accounting software QuickBooks is its built-in expense management tool. There are obvious advantages to expenses being handled via your accounting platform, like how easy it is to claim business expenses for tax purposes. And when you connect your bank to the platform, QuickBooks automatically matches and organises your receipts to transactions.
Most suitable for: Businesses who want more comprehensive accounting tools built into their spend management software
Quickbooks has five plans:
Fortnox is a cloud-based accounting software platform based in Sweden that helps businesses manage their accounting and bookkeeping processes, as well as other financial admin like spend management. Users can take photos of receipts and instantly upload them via a mobile app, and the platform automatically fills in date, amount and VAT.
Most suitable for: Businesses that operate in Sweden
Fortnox has three plans:
The information in this guide can help you make your decision, but ultimately, you need to factor in considerations about your business and its needs when choosing a platform. Here are three things you can do to ensure you’re choosing an ideal solution.
As you’ll notice from the list above, different software solutions are more suitable for different business industries and sizes. For example, Juni is spend management software built with the needs of ecommerce companies in mind. So when researching a platform, pay close attention to what type of business (big or small, ecommerce or SaaS) it’s best suited for.
While it shouldn’t be the only factor that guides your decision, you can’t ignore pricing when choosing a solution. You need to find a healthy balance between a platform you can afford (and doesn't go over budget) that still gives you all the key features and functionalities you need to run smarter, more efficient financial admin.
You may be a small business now, but if you have plans of scaling in the future, you want to make sure your expense management solution can scale with you. Juni, for example, caters to both SMBs as well as mid-market companies, meaning we can provide the solutions you need from the time your business is founder-led to when it has 100+ employees.
While you can never remove expense management from your to-do list, you can find a platform that does most of the work for you. The best spend management software is one that not only simplifies financial operations but also contributes to strategic decision-making and the long-term financial health of your organisation.
To find a platform that does all that, you need to make sure you’re making your selection with the unique needs of your business in mind. For example, if you operate in digital commerce, you want to choose a solution like Juni that comes with ecommerce-specific capabilities, like features designed specifically for media buying and online transactions.
So take your time finding the right platform—doing so can lead to significant time savings and valuable insights into spending patterns, helping you improve the overall financial health and success of your business.
Spend less time on spend management
With real-time spend overviews, receipt matching automation and powerful integrations, Juni will make you forget what a hassle managing your expenses used to be.
Spend management software is a platform or tool that helps businesses manage and control their expenses. This type of solution usually includes features for receipt management, expense reporting and approval workflows. Plus, these platforms often integrate with accounting software, as well as sync with banks and credit cards.
There are a number of benefits to using spend management software to control your expenses, including:
The price of expense management software varies depending on the size of your business and what industry you operate in, as this will impact which platform you choose. Prices range from as low as £7 per month to almost £100, and some spend management systems also offer free plans to certain users.
Imagine wrapping up the financial year only to discover a hidden pile of invoices for services that don’t contribute to your current objectives. These unplanned expenses not only disrupt your financial balance but also offer little to no value to your business.
By adopting spend management best practices, you can avoid such pitfalls, gaining greater control, visibility, and standardisation across all expenditures.
In this post, we’ll explore what spend management entails, the benefits it brings to your business, and how to effectively implement it.
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Spend management is the set of practices that enable you to manage expenditure in line with company objectives, enhancing operational efficiency, maximising value, reducing costs and minimising financial risk across multiple currencies and global transactions.
It involves the strategic planning, execution, and monitoring of your expenses to ensure that they align with your company’s overall objectives. This includes managing both direct and indirect spend, such as inventory, marketing and employee expenses, to optimise cash flow and reduce costs.
Effective spend management is crucial to maintaining financial stability and achieving your business goals.
Some of the key advantages of implementing effective spend management strategies include:
Spend management gives you a clear view of where your money is going.
Without it, much of your data is invisible or scattered across multiple files and formats, making it hard to get an accurate understanding of total spend. With spend management, it’s easier to pinpoint what’s efficient, what’s not, and what you need to address.
Spend management is about more than just allocating budget: it ensures all your expense data is tracked, structured, and available for future reference. This helps you identify spend patterns and figure out where you’re getting the best ROI. Streamlining processes and eliminating inefficiencies can also bring cost savings, which can be reinvested into your business activities.
With increased visibility over your spend and optimised financial processes, you can better manage your cash flow and reduce your risk of financial instability.
Minimising wasteful spending also allows for more efficient resource allocation. For example, by reallocating funds from redundant subscriptions to high-impact projects, you can drive business growth more effectively.
Effective spend management makes it easier for department heads to stick to their budgets.
Regularly monitoring spending against your budget should allow you to make adjustments as needed, which can help prevent overspending or investment in the wrong areas.
With structured data at your fingertips, you can gain valuable insights into expenses across departments, suppliers and projects.
This allows for informed decision-making, which helps you identify cost-saving opportunities or areas where you need to make cuts.
Spend management can save you time. Automating manual expense tracking and approval processes can free your employees up to focus on more high-value activities.
As well as saving time, spend management can improve accuracy and reduce the burden on your finance team. They often spend hours chasing and matching invoices with receipts, trying to control employee card spend and match up data to business performance. With spend management tools, this can be done faster and without human error.
For example, Juni enables operational efficiency through automations and 2500+ integrations. This includes features like accounts payable tools, invoice matching and reporting/analytics. It also allows you to centralise financial operations like media spend and reconciliation.
Spend management can also remove the friction of employees having to manually request approval for every purchase order, which can lead to greater efficiency.
Effective spend management can help reduce risk by ensuring that all your purchases align with your company's policies and strategic priorities, improving overall cost control. It can also help reduce errors in financial reporting and accounting, as well as identify and solve cash flow issues.
Enforcing spending policies and automating approval workflows can help maintain compliance. This reduces the risk of unauthorised or non-compliant spending, which helps you avoid potential fines and reputational damage.
Implementing robust expense tracking, approval workflows and auditing capabilities helps eliminate fraud and protects your business, as well as prevent maverick spend. This is when goods or services are purchased outside of established procurement processes, which can be a significant drain on your finances.
Tailored approval workflows, custom spending limits and compliance controls help ensure all purchases align with your company's policies and strategic priorities.
The right spend management solutions offer multiple benefits, but they’re not without their challenges, especially if you’re working manually. Let’s take a look at those next.
Managing spend across different locations, departments, or business units takes a high degree of organisation and oversight, not to mention a lot of time.
If your data is stored across multiple systems, it’s also very challenging to access and analyse it, which slows down and undermines the decision-making process.
The absence of a standardised classification system for spend categories can make it challenging to compare and benchmark data across departments or entities.
This also makes it difficult to see how your company is performing compared to others in the same industry.
Manual processes and disparate systems lead to inefficiencies, errors and delays, resulting in increased costs and decreased productivity.
Inefficient processes and manual tracking methods can also make it difficult to obtain real-time visibility into spending activities, which can impact your ability to make informed decisions about your spending.
A key barrier to procuring a spend management solution is that it can feel like a burden, because you have to add another ‘tool’ to your business.
This is because many spend management tools have limited financial capabilities, rarely integrate with your financial tech stack, and aren’t tailored to digital commerce businesses.
Data-driven decision-making is only as good as the data it's based on. If your data is incomplete, inconsistent or inaccurate, you can’t draw actionable insights from it.
Manually cleaning and structuring data takes a lot of time and effort. You’ll also need top analytics skills to identify and extract the right reports from collected spend data, which adds to your costs.
Spend management requires time and effort to identify, collect, and analyse data regularly. If your teams and systems aren’t set up to facilitate this, it can be a big drain on your resources.
Securing the budget for investment in spend management processes or software may also be challenging as you have to convince those holding the purse strings that it's worth the investment by showing them hard data.
Now you know the benefits and challenges of spend management, let’s look at how to set up efficient expense management in your organisation.
Before implementing spend management processes, you need to think about what you want to gain from doing so. For example, increase efficiency, reduce maverick spend, ensure better compliance?
Knowing this will put you in a better position to identify which areas to tackle first and whether your current systems and processes are sufficient. If not, you’ll need to look at investing in a dedicated spend management tool. In this case, being clear about your needs will help you choose the right platform.
Next, perform a thorough analysis of your current spending patterns and identify all your spending channels, direct and indirect.
Full visibility into where your money is going will help you find opportunities for optimisation and cost savings. You’ll also need to get control over supplier management, purchasing, expense reporting and approval workflows.
Relying on manual data entry, uploading invoices and using spreadsheets to structure and analyse information can increase your business risk and isn’t scalable.
For this reason, consider an automated platform like Juni that allows you to centralise your spend.
Juni collects and scans your invoices automatically, and you can choose to pay them immediately or get financing to pay them later. You can also manage your unpaid invoices and accounts payable processes using Juni, bringing all your financial admin under one roof.
By integrating with your existing tech stack and giving you a real-time view of your financial operations, Juni gives you access to the data you need to make fast, accurate decisions about cost control measures, multi-currency transactions and spend optimisation.
Once you’ve chosen a platform and set up your systems, you need to communicate your spending policies and guidelines. This is essential to help ensure compliance and maintain control over your company's finances.
Make standardised processes and policies available in an easy-to-access format like a document, internal web page or Notion page. This will make accessing and understanding your policies fast and simple across the team.
Educating your employees on the importance of effective spend management and the tools and processes involved is crucial for driving adoption and success.
This can include training on expense reporting, procurement procedures and the use of spend management software.
By analysing your spending data, you can identify trends, detect anomalies, and make informed decisions that align with your business objectives, which is crucial for continuous improvement.
This could involve examining spend by category, vendor or department, and using those insights to optimise your procurement processes, supply chain and budgeting.
Manually tracking spend across multiple channels, departments or business units is slow and costly.
Spend management best practices give you greater visibility into and control over your finances by standardising processes, establishing clear spending policies and guidelines and allowing you to make data-driven decisions.
If you’re using a platform like Juni, you can digitise all your data including incoming invoices and employee expenses so you have everything at your fingertips. No more manually chasing down invoices or uploading them to your system.
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Spend management is all about getting visibility into and control over company spend. For example, sourcing, budgeting, data management, supplier management, and cash flow management.
Spend analysis involves data collection, data cleansing, data analysis to uncover potential areas where you can streamline processes, improve efficiency, or achieve cost savings.
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