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Alternatives

Melio alternatives

Melio lets small businesses pay suppliers by bank transfer or card, including suppliers who still only accept cheques. Standard bank payments are free on its basic tier, and it syncs with QuickBooks and Xero.

Why people look

Why teams look for a Melio alternative

The reasons that come up in evaluations. Whether they apply to you depends mostly on where your receipts come from.

Before anyone can pay an invoice, somebody has to find it, read it and decide which account it belongs to.

Smartbills captures the invoice, reads its lines, matches it to the order and codes it, which leaves the payment as the only step.

Nothing checks a bill against what was actually ordered before the money leaves the account.

Each bill is coded line by line and routed to the approver who owns that budget. A wrong invoice gets caught before it is paid.

Card spend and employee purchases are tracked in a spreadsheet somewhere else entirely.

Receipts, card transactions, expenses and supplier bills share one ledger, and the month reconciles without the spreadsheet.

The shortlist

6 alternatives to Melio

The products teams shortlist against Melio, each with what it's for. The order isn't a ranking, and the criteria are explained below.

  1. BILL

    Worth a look if your payables team loses more time finding and coding invoices than paying them, and card receipts sit in another tool.

    Best forBusinesses paying supplier invoices at high volume, especially when most of their suppliers are already enrolled on the BILL network.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  2. QuickBooks

    Keeps QuickBooks as your ledger and replaces only its receipt capture, sending in itemized, policy-checked entries.

    Best forBusinesses whose receipt volume is small enough that the capture already included with QuickBooks still copes.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  3. Procurify

    For teams whose spending shows up as receipts and supplier bills more often than as requisitions.

    Best forRequisition-driven organizations such as labs, schools and non-profits, where checking the budget at the moment of request is the real control.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  4. Xero

    Leaves Xero as your ledger and takes over expense claims and receipts, which reach Xero itemized and already coded.

    Best forBusinesses whose claim volume is small enough that the bundled expenses module still copes.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  5. Sage

    An alternative to Sage Expense Management (formerly Fyle) that delivers receipts as data, while your Sage ledger stays put.

    Best forOrganizations on Sage that place real value on buying the ledger and the expense product from one vendor.

    Compare it with Smartbills

  6. FreshBooks

    Covers the spending side (itemized receipts, card control and coding) while FreshBooks keeps invoicing your clients.

    Best forFreelancers and small agencies whose financial job is invoicing clients and tracking billable time.

    Compare it with Smartbills

Disclosure

And Smartbills, which is ours

Slipping our own product into a roundup without saying so is exactly what makes these pages worthless, so to be clear, this one is ours.

Smartbills

Best for: Businesses that need capture, approvals and accounting coding around the payment, not only the payment itself.

Smartbills vs Melio

How this list was put together

These are the products that come up in the same evaluations as Melio, drawn from what prospects actually shortlist against it and from the rest of its category. The order is editorial rather than a ranking, because we don't run benchmarks on products we don't operate, and a scored table written by a vendor about its competitors isn't evidence. Each entry links to a full comparison with claims specific enough to check.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What people ask us before they sign up.

You should not if you pay a handful of suppliers a month. Smartbills starts to make sense when coding and approving invoices is what eats the time, and the payment itself is the easy part.

No. Smartbills pays by bank transfer or card. A supplier who only accepts cheques is a real constraint that Melio handles and we do not.

Yes: multi-level approvals by threshold, category and entity, with creating, approving and paying kept in separate hands.

Get started

Comparing Melio with something else?

Bring one month of your own receipts and card transactions. The number that settles it is the share of transactions that ended up with an itemized document attached, and you can measure that in one cycle.

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