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Best expense management software

Corporate cards, expense reports and the approval workflow around them. These tools differ less in the report itself than in where the receipt attached to it came from.

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Expense management

Best expense management software

Corporate cards, expense reports and the approval workflow around them. These tools differ less in the report itself than in where the receipt attached to it came from.

  1. Expensify

    The expense report app most finance teams already know, set against Smartbills on where each receipt comes from before anyone files it.

    Best forChoose Expensify if your team already runs on its expense reports and wants a familiar, well-supported report-and-approve workflow it won't have to relearn.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  2. Ramp

    A corporate card program with spend management built around it. The comparison turns on what a card feed can and can't tell you.

    Best forChoose Ramp if you're consolidating US card spend onto one program and the rebate, the controls and the card itself are where you see the value.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  3. Brex

    Cards and business banking for US companies. This comparison is about the purchase document behind each card charge.

    Best forChoose Brex if you're a venture-backed or enterprise US company that wants cards, banking, treasury and spend controls from one vendor.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  4. SAP Concur

    The long-time enterprise T&E standard, set against Smartbills on setup time and on where the receipt comes from.

    Best forChoose SAP Concur if you run managed travel, have complex global policy across many entities, and have the internal resources to configure and maintain it.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  5. Navan

    Travel booking first, expenses second. This comparison is about the everyday spend that isn't a trip.

    Best forChoose Navan if your people travel constantly and you want booking, travel policy and expenses in a single flow for the traveller.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  6. Pleo

    European company cards that prompt for a receipt within seconds. The question here is whether anyone should still be photographing it.

    Best forChoose Pleo if you're a European team looking for the smoothest card-and-receipt loop, with deep local accounting integrations and local support.

    Compare it with Smartbills

How to choose expense management software

People buy expense management software for three benefits: fewer receipts to chase, policy checked before anyone is reimbursed, and expenses that reach the books already coded. Whether a tool delivers them comes down to six things.

Where the receipt comes from

Every tool can attach a photo. Fewer can get the receipt without one. Check whether receipts can arrive from your email or straight from the merchant's point of sale, or only from a picture the employee remembers to take. Missing receipts are what hold up most month-ends.

Your cards or theirs

Ramp, Brex, Float and BILL Spend & Expense issue their own corporate cards, and much of what they offer runs through them. Others work with the cards you already carry: Navan's expense features connect existing corporate or business cards, and Expensify takes commercial card feeds from Visa, Mastercard and American Express. Decide first whether changing cards is part of the project.

When policy is checked

A rule that runs when the expense is submitted catches a problem while the employee can still fix it. A rule that only shows up at approval, or at month-end, leaves the manager to catch it. Ask to see what happens to an out-of-policy expense, step by step.

Sales tax, if you're in Canada

An input tax credit claim needs the GST or HST, and in Québec the QST, kept apart from the total, with the supplier's registration number. Check that the tool keeps each tax on its own line rather than one tax total, and that it works in French if your team does.

Accounting sync

Look for a direct sync with the ledger you run (QuickBooks Online, Xero, Sage or NetSuite), coding to your own GL accounts and cost centres, and the receipt attached to the entry. That attachment is what your accountant opens when a number is questioned.

How it's priced

Some platforms charge for each active user every month. Others offer a free software tier: Ramp, Brex and Float each list a $0 plan, Zoho Expense's free plan stops at three users, and Navan's expense features are free for the first five users. Check what the free tier leaves out and what it assumes, such as moving your spending onto the vendor's card.

Where Smartbills fits

Smartbills is expense management for businesses in Canada and the US that want fewer receipts to chase. At stores that send receipts through Smartbills (Square, Toast, Clover, Lightspeed and Shopify POS) the itemized receipt arrives as data at checkout, receipts in connected mailboxes are read where they land, and employees add the rest from the app. You keep the cards you already carry. Policy runs when an expense is submitted, approvals route by amount and cost centre, each tax stays on its own line, and approved expenses post to QuickBooks, Xero, Sage or NetSuite with the receipt attached.

Expense management softwareExpense reportsHow to streamline expense management

Every comparison in this category

The full set, including the ones above.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

The one built around how your team already spends. If you want a new corporate card program with the software included, Ramp, Brex and, in Canada, Float are built for that. If you want to keep your current cards, Navan and Expensify connect existing card programs, and Zoho Expense adds card feeds on its paid plans and has a free plan for up to three users. If the hard part is getting receipts at all, Smartbills gets them from the stores that send them and from your mailbox, checks policy at submission and syncs to QuickBooks or Xero.

Less time chasing receipts, policy checked before an expense is approved rather than after it's reimbursed, faster reimbursement for employees, and expenses that arrive in the accounting software coded, with the receipt attached. In Canada there's a tax benefit too: keeping GST, HST and QST on their own lines makes input tax credits easier to claim and to support in an audit.

Yes, with limits. Ramp, Brex and Float each list a $0 plan, Zoho Expense is free for up to three users with 20 receipt scans per user a month, and Navan's expense features are free for the first five users who submit expenses each month. Smartbills has a free plan too. Free tiers tend to cap users or features, or assume you'll use the vendor's own card. Compare those limits with how your team works.

Float is built in Canada and lists customer support in English and French. Ramp now says it's available to Canadian businesses, with its cards issued in Canada by Peoples Trust Company. Smartbills serves Canada and the US and keeps GST, HST, PST and QST on their own lines. Whichever you choose, check that expenses can be reimbursed in Canadian dollars and that the tool syncs with the ledger your accountant uses.

Expense management software handles the expense after it happens: the receipt, the report, the approval and the reimbursement. A spend management platform adds the parts around it, usually corporate cards, budgets and supplier bills, in one product. Most of the platforms on this page sell both. The question worth asking is which parts you need now and which you'd still run elsewhere.

Not always. Smartbills, Navan and Expensify work with the cards you already have, and Zoho Expense reads Visa and Mastercard feeds on its paid plans. Ramp, Brex, Float and BILL Spend & Expense issue their own cards, and you get the most from them when your spending moves onto those cards.

Not the way you'd trust an independent review. What you can check is whether each page names something the competitor does better, whether the claims are structural rather than about plan checkboxes, and whether we tell you when to buy the other product. All three can be verified just by reading.

Because we'd have to copy someone else's price list and keep it current, and comparison pages in this industry are full of figures that were wrong within a quarter. Read the vendor's own pricing page and compare on the plan you'd actually buy, not the headline number, which on both sides leaves something out.

Usually yes, and it's often the right first step. Smartbills reads card and bank feeds and syncs to your ledger, so capture can run in parallel for one cycle while you compare the share of transactions that end up with an itemized document attached.

Tell us which one. We add a comparison when enough prospects raise the same name, and we'd rather write it properly than publish a thin page to fill a slot.

Where these facts come from

Facts about other vendors on this page were checked on each vendor's own site on October 21, 2026.

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Compare on your own data, not ours.

Connect a card feed and your ledger, run it for a month and count the transactions that ended up with an itemized document attached. That number is the comparison that matters.

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