“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.
Performance marketing is a relatively new term for something that has been with us for most of the Internet's existence. It is a way of describing marketing that is rewarded only based on results. It is direct marketing applied to the world of the Internet. It has many facets, but the core tenet is its reliance on tracking, data, analytics, and conversion optimization. After all, as a performance marketer, you only get paid every time you get a potential customer to take some action that a vendor has prescribed.
The easiest way to define performance marketing is to say that it is the act of paying for some action to be performed. It could be a sale, lead generated, or even a visit. Either way, you are paying for someone to do some prescribed action that you are then paid for. You do this successfully by having the acquisition cost be less than the value of the action you got that person to perform. This performance marketing strategy is called arbitrage.
The overall performance marketing landscape hasn't changed much since 2021, but there are still a few considerations you need to consider when planning your strategy for 2022. The biggest one is the typical Google shuffle that occurs once the algorithm has been changed. This shuffle will affect search engine optimization experts using this traffic source for their performance marketing efforts.
As a performance marketer, there are two main ways to make it work. You can either be an affiliate or a product owner. The affiliate strategy is less costly to get started, and you don't have the advantage of being able to tweak the offer and have multiple backend products to improve your customer lifetime value. You also don't get the benefit of being able to fundamentally change aspects of your product to make it more appealing to potential customers. However, you can walk away and choose to promote another product relatively quickly when using this strategy. It means you are never tied down to any one product or vendor. You also don't need to spend time doing market research and creating a product from scratch for a market. This makes the affiliate strategy great for people who want quick earnings but don't want to invest in creating a full-time business.
The main benefit of going with the product owner strategy is that it allows complete control over your product and strategy. You can tweak the offer as much as you want, and you don't have to share in the profits with anyone. You can also create many backend products for up-selling to potential buyers. However, the major downside is you get all the responsibilities that come with running a full-time business. The main one will be handling customer complaints and handing out refunds. If your product is more complicated, you might also be tasked with providing detailed support to people. That might cause you to outsource certain responsibilities to third parties, but that strategy eats into your profit margin in the same way that being an affiliate marketer would.
Regardless of the strategy, the primary way to do performance marketing is to find a traffic source and redirect those people to an offer that eventually leads to conversion. The main considerations here are the cost of the traffic and your conversion rate. The task of a performance marketer is to maximise the math involved to ensure that you are always making a profit. You can also do long-term strategies like building an email list to sell more products in the future.
There are many legal concerns with the various political, medical, informational sensitivity rules coming into play. For example, certain traffic sources are not allowing some ads to be put on their platform. You also have new rules because of the recent privacy laws and sanctions enacted by the European Union. GDPR is a set of new rules surrounding general data protection regulation for countries in the European Union. If you allow people from any of these countries to visit your website, you need to be compliant with these rules. It can be quite difficult because these rules are specifically about privacy and data retention for advertising purposes. It makes your job much more difficult. It also makes accessing clean data for advertising purposes even harder than before.
Modern performance marketing started when people like Claude Hopkins created the first sales letters and started a direct marketing revolution. Since then, the emphasis has been on effective design and psychological principles. There are certain people dedicated to studying the emotional buttons to push to sell certain products. As a performance marketer, it is critical to understand design principles to maximise your conversions. It is also vital to understand what psychological buttons to press to ensure that you are being as persuasive as possible with your words and images. No matter how good your offer is, you will not build a profitable enterprise without a good understanding of these principles. In fact, understanding these principles can even help an unethical performance marketer sell harmful products to people.
Affiliate marketing used to be the predominant term used to describe what performance marketing is. However, as affiliate marketers matured, they realised that they weren't considered to be serious businesses by other people around them. Performance marketing is a way for them to legitimise what is going on. However, performance marketing emphasises building long-term systems that can sustain a business. It isn't just the same model utilised by affiliate marketers to push digital products under a new brand.
Traditional affiliate marketing can be a hit or miss because there is typically no long-term strategy. You research a product and then look for traffic sources to promote it. However, after that product stops selling, your campaign is over, and you have to start all over again. This cycle is a major problem if you are trying to build a sustainable business. On top of that, you also don't have systems in place to make outsourcing easier. That ensures you will do all the work yourself, and you can never scale to a level where it doesn't depend on you. Many affiliate marketers have transitioned to performance marketing because it works more like a business. These performance marketers can build teams that are responsible for each piece of the campaign. They also build email lists and other customer retention schemes to ensure that they can always market to them later. On top of that, they build custom relationships with vendors that ensure they get preferable commissions and incentives. The major difference between affiliate marketing and performance marketing is in the mindset. Once you change your mindset, you can start building a more sustainable long-term business using these methods.
Many marketing agencies still have a Madison Avenue view of the world. They focus on building campaigns to promote products instead of getting sales. Direct Marketing can work even better if you apply Madison Avenue principles. Marketing agencies can combine the two to deliver more value to their customers. It means more sales for customers, which will help attract new ones. You can also use the principles of performance marketing to improve your traditional marketing campaigns. For example, data and tracking are two important components in performance marketing. Almost everything is tracked and traced during a performance marketing campaign. You can bring that level of sophistication to your traditional marketing campaign, and it will make you more effective.
Almost anyone can start an ecommerce company today without much effort. There are many full-service shipping services, and you even have services for building and hosting an Internet store. All of these resources mean the ecommerce marketplace has gotten a lot more competitive. The one place that makes the difference is in marketing. The best ecommerce services are the ones that can drive traffic to their offers on a mass scale. By utilizing performance marketing, you can drive traffic from various sources to ensure that your business can be viable and sustainable. If you do it well, you won't be dependent on marketplaces like eBay or Amazon. It makes it possible to scale by getting traffic from all over the Internet. It also means you can build a sustainable business without many other components that would traditionally be involved.
Performance marketing makes it easy to create a sustainable dropshipping business. One of the only things to worry about in dropshipping is getting traffic. However, if you can create sustainable campaigns, you can build a good business out of dropshipping. You could potentially even turn your dropshipping business into being a full retail outlet, collecting all the profits for yourself. Performance marketing also makes it easier for you to scale out by attracting other performance marketers to help you grow your business. In this way, you only have benefits when using these methods.
What are some of the performance marketing methods you need to know?
The overwhelming majority of performance marketers avoid SEO in favor of faster methods. However, if you are just starting and don't have a lot of initial capital, SEO is a great way to build a profitable enterprise without putting in a lot of money. That being said, the main downside is that it is quite slow, and it is a lot more competitive than it used to be. Still, if you are willing to create insightful content that engages people, you have a chance of building a successful SEO-based performance marketing business.
Media buying is the most extensive way of building a performance marketing business. However, media buying is typically the final frontier that experienced marketers go to. It is not friendly to beginners, and it can be difficult to understand the various traffic sources and methods used. Media buying means purchasing advertising space on a website. There are millions of websites, and you have unlimited options, making media buying one of the most complicated fields in performance marketing.
PPC marketing is easier than media buying, but it is a lot more expensive. That is because it is where beginners flock when just starting. Google also has complete control, meaning you don't have the creative freedom you usually would. Google can also ban you in a second, destroying your business quite easily. It is one of the many reasons why performance marketers opt to avoid PPC marketing in favor of other media buying ventures. However, if you stay within the ever-changing boundaries of Google's TOS, you can make a lot of profit as a performance marketer with search engine traffic.
Content marketing is another area where performance marketers typically try to get into. As the name says, it means creating content that will attract many readers and social media shares. The key here is to use that content to drive visitors back to your landing page. The main issue is that not every piece of content will go viral, and it can get expensive to create all the content needed to build a sustainable business. However, it is an effective way of starting on a budget if you are willing to research and write the content by yourself.
Social media has become a crucial component in how we live our lives and express ourselves. Performance marketing on social media is tricky, but it is similar to content marketing. The main way to drive traffic is to be outrageous, bombastic, and controversial. Clickbait has become common in this arena, and it is a very successful strategy to employ. On some social media networks, you also have access to a treasure trove of personal information, making it possible to target on a level you never thought possible before.
As Internet users changed their browsing patterns, advertisers saw that banner ads weren't being clicked on anymore. This has led to them doing many things to embed those advertisements into the content. Native ads are a way of embedding advertisements into your content, and it seamlessly blends together. This makes it possible to camouflage your content and ads, meaning a much higher clickthrough rate for everyone. It is also an effective strategy for modern marketers who want to gain access to some of the biggest publishers on the Internet. This is quickly becoming one of the best performance marketing strategies for 2022.
The majority of serious performance marketers maintain an email list of potential buyers. They do a lot of promotions to ensure that this email list is always up-to-date and useful. It is one of the best ways of securing your business future, as it is one of the few Internet assets that you can own yourself. In most other performance marketing channels, you can get banned in an instant. With an email list, you always have people to market to.
An ad server is a crucial component in the performance marketing world. That is especially true if you are doing media buying. It allows you to keep 100% of the data from your media buying and advertising efforts. You can do basic analytical manipulation to get more insightful information from this data as well.
The most important piece of the puzzle for performance marketing is click tracking. In performance marketing, data collection is everything. It is why GDPR is such a major stumbling block in the industry. However, click tracking is crucial because it gives you precise control over what you can optimise. It gives you the knowledge needed to know when a campaign will fail or not. It can even give you detailed insights into what words need to be changed in your marketing copy. All aspects of your marketing can be improved with the right information. Click tracking gives you the ability to understand demographics and much more when running a campaign. It is usually one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, and it is why software programs that do this function are so expensive.
The final piece of the puzzle is your analytics system. It goes hand-in-hand with click tracking. It allows you to get a detailed and comprehensive understanding of your campaign. You can use that information to optimise for location, sex, age, and many more demographic factors. You can also use it to figure out the most compelling images and words. However, this method is becoming much more difficult with the phasing out of third-party cookies and other legal mechanisms being implemented to protect privacy. It is one of the many considerations you need to have going forward in this field.
One of the biggest problems with running a performance marketing business is getting your finances in order. Having a clear oversight and understanding of where your money is and how it flows can give your business a strategic advantage when running and scaling your performance marketing campaigns. That is one of the reasons we started Juni - the financial platform for ecommerce entrepreneurs and digital marketers. We build tailor-made financial management solutions which are designed to make your life easier, optimise your performance marketing efforts, and provide resources to help you scale your business.
Start your journey with Juni today and take your marketing game to the next level.
Apply now.
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