“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.
Growing a digital commerce business relies on positive cash flow so you can channel your resources into building your brand and customer base. But, the rush to realise your company’s strategic vision for growth makes it easy to sacrifice cost control.
Your logistics and spend management processes are only going to become more complex as you grow, so, by emphasising financial and operational visibility early on, you reduce the risk of cutting into profits down the road.
Integrating spend management solutions into your tech stack can play a key role in giving you that visibility, efficiency and liquidity — all of which facilitate healthy long-term growth.
With expert advice and tried-and-true formulas and best practices, we explore how you can overcome some of your biggest business inefficiencies with support from a spend management solution.
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Before investing in a spend management solution, you need to get clarity about the black holes, or untracked and misunderstood expenses, in your budget. Let’s unpack a few examples.
What makes marketing spend tricky is that some experts will tell you to invest more in social media and Google Ads to scale faster, while others will encourage you to put all your eggs in the organic marketing basket. The reality is that, for sustainable growth, most cases require investment in a hybrid approach, which involves a combination of both paid and organic tactics.
But how do you know if you’re tying up too much of your capital in marketing spend? Determine your marketing ROI by calculating your return on ad spend (ROAS) and the return on organic content spend (ROCS).
Determine your ROAS with this formula
You can break this down for your TikTok, Facebook and Google Ads campaigns. Then compare which are most successful and make future investments based on your return. In general, it’s good to aim for an overall ROAS of 400%, or $4 made for each $1 you spend.
Determine your ROCS with the same formula
The great thing about using ROCS to track organic marketing spend? It’s compelling to the C-suite. As the CMO of marketing at Zapier said to Director of Content Lane Scott Jones when looking at her ROCS numbers, “With these ROI numbers, tell me why I shouldn’t give you advertising’s entire budget right now?”
If you determine that you’ve overspent on marketing, that might be the reason your dedicated cards for marketing spend are getting blocked by traditional banks, which often aren’t set up properly to fund a marketing engine.
Your inventory, like your brand, is your business’s bread and butter, but it can work to your disadvantage without enough oversight. Supply chain issues, the push and pull of supply and demand and seasonal fluctuation can all drain your cash flow buffer.
If you suspect your inventory is what’s putting a strain on your finances, it could be because:
If your accounting team handles your supplier invoices manually, you could be incurring costs due to missed invoices, data entry mistakes and even fraudulent or duplicate invoices.
Another possible issue? Limited cash flow. Supplier payment delays have also become a bigger issue after recent market turmoil, triggered by a narrowly avoided U.S. and European recession last year.
Last year, a PayIt survey found that 27% of SMBs in the UK admitted they were owed £5,000 to £20,000 in unpaid invoices, and 55% said their late payments problem had only gotten worse over the previous year.
This issue puts strain on both the vendor and the supplier side of ecommerce businesses, meaning that those that act as suppliers themselves for wholesale buyers aren’t getting paid, and aren’t, in turn, able to pay their own suppliers.
According to Gartner research, 83% of software buyers make decisions as part of a diverse, cross-functional committee, including the C-suite, department leads and other staff members. This isn’t necessarily an issue, but if that describes your business, it could mean that your Head of Finance needs custom controls in place to ensure your spend is properly managed.
To get more financial oversight, your IT and finance team should conduct regular software audits to track all current subscriptions and contracts and make sure the software your business utilises is worth the investment.
When your finance team serves as a function of your C-suite rather than a strategic partner, it’s harder to develop a realistic long-term vision for your business that also takes your current financial and operational limitations into account.
So, if you find that your financial goals aren’t keeping pace with your overall business goals, it may be time to “take a step back from triage mode,” says Camunda CEO Jakob Freund in a piece for Forbes.
According to Freund, doing so allows you to examine your own strategic processes with more clarity. ”Viewing processes in a holistic manner — how they integrate, their reusability and their alignment with business objectives — lays the groundwork for effective automation.”
Manual spend management processes are costly in terms of time and strain on available cash flow, making ambitious growth goals harder to reach. So let’s explore how integrating spend management software can help give you more control over your business finances.
A dedicated digital commerce spend management platform can serve as your business’s financial central command centre.
See what available funds you have and where you’re spending the most so you can make tweaks to your accounting and processes as you go. The best part? Today’s spend management software solutions offer mobile apps so you can check on your business analytics from anywhere.
Many digital commerce businesses grow internationally, but financial institutions tend to charge high foreign exchange (FX) rates when you pay international suppliers, vendors and employers in multiple currencies.
You can address this with spend management tools that are designed so you can manage multiple international bank account number (IBAN) accounts in your preferred currencies and control them all from one dashboard.
You can also track how you’re spending all available currencies, which helps you stay compliant with tax regulations in every country.
Manual processes are commonplace in early-stage businesses, but they can cost you time and resources and may lead to tax and legal compliance issues due to data-entry errors.
Fortunately, spend management software doesn’t mean you’re giving up control over your processes — instead, it allows you to create the custom rules, templates and workflows that make sense for your business. You can even implement tax codes and automate payments and transactions so suppliers and vendors never have to wait.
Staying liquid is essential for growth so you always have the capital you need to spend on marketing campaigns, inventory, logistics and fulfilment and overall process optimisation.
But that’s not always possible when banks charge high interest rates on loans. What’s more, most banks won’t offer capital for media buying, which hampers your ability to build your online brand. That’s where spend management tools made for digital commerce come in — they can offer you capital for media buying and inventory financing to ease your cash flow.
So, how do you know which tools are best for your digital ecommerce business? Let’s look at some of the features you should prioritise:
Every business expense — from team member cab rides and coffees to software procurement — will catch up with you in the long run if you don’t get control of it now. So, if you’ve been struggling to stay liquid amid market turbulence, it may be time to consider spend management solutions for granular visibility into your finances.
Not sure where to start? Juni allows you to view and manage expenses and payments from any device. We also offer multiple cash flow solutions so you can implement your spend strategies faster and more effectively.
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