Struggling to control your company’s budget?
Manual expense reports and scattered receipts make it nearly impossible to see where your money is actually going until it’s too late.
Here’s the real problem: this lack of clarity stalls growth and makes strategic financial planning a constant guessing game for your business.
Recent economic pressures have only made this harder. According to SAP Concur, companies faced T&E budget pressures from inflation, forcing them to rethink their strategies. This shows how critical tight expense control has become.
The right tool can fix this by automating expense tracking and reporting, giving you a real-time view of your company’s finances.
In this article, I will guide you through the best expense tracking software available today. I’ll help you find a solution that fits your specific needs.
You will discover tools that integrate with your accounting system and streamline approvals, saving you time and money on manual data entry.
Let’s dive in.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Expensify → | Growing SMBs | |
| 2 | QuickBooks → | Growing SMBs | |
| 3 | Zoho → | Financial managers at SMBs | |
| 4 | Rippling → | Financial managers | |
| 5 | FreshBooks → | SMBs seeking efficiency |
1. Expensify
Tired of budget chaos and endless receipts?
You need a solution that simplifies your financial tracking, eliminating manual data entry.
Expensify offers a simple, intuitive way to manage your expenses, allowing you to focus on growth.
It’s time to gain control.
Expensify solves these problems by providing automated expense reporting, making your financial life easier.
You can simply snap a picture of a receipt with your phone and Expensify takes care of the rest, automatically categorizing and tracking it.
This means you get real-time expense insights, helping you streamline project-specific budgeting and ensure accurate client billing. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with your existing accounting systems for effortless financial management.
This simplifies your workflow significantly.
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Key features:
- Automated expense reporting streamlines the entire process from receipt capture to reimbursement, ensuring you save time and reduce errors in your financial records.
- Real-time expense tracking provides immediate insights into spending, helping you make informed budget decisions and maintain control over your project finances daily.
- Seamless accounting integrations connect directly with QuickBooks and Xero, simplifying data transfer and ensuring your general ledger is always up-to-date and accurate.
Learn more about Expensify features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Expensify stands out as a strong contender for the best expense tracking software, especially for growing SMBs aiming to replace outdated manual processes. Its automated receipt capture, real-time tracking, and direct accounting integrations offer powerful tools to streamline expense management, reducing manual data entry and providing granular control over spending.
2. QuickBooks
Overwhelmed by expense tracking options for your growing SMB?
QuickBooks offers a comprehensive platform designed to streamline your budget control, eliminating manual data entry and providing clarity. This means you can securely import and automatically organize all your financial transactions.
You’ll gain peace of mind knowing your expenses are accurately categorized for tax deductions, helping you focus on your core business instead of tedious tasks.
Here’s how QuickBooks streamlines your financial management.
QuickBooks simplifies your financial operations by centralizing all your money in and out. It helps you track income and expenses effortlessly, offering automated bookkeeping features that cut down on manual efforts.
This allows you to snap photos of receipts and categorize them on the go, ensuring every expense is captured efficiently. You can also automatically track mileage for business trips and assign vendor payments to 1099 categories, which significantly eases year-end tax preparation and compliance.
Additionally, QuickBooks provides powerful reporting tools, including profit & loss and expense reports, so you can monitor financial metrics and make confident decisions about your spending and overall business health.
Make smart financial decisions.
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Key features:
- Automated Income & Expense Tracking: Securely import and automatically organize all your financial transactions, cutting down on manual data entry and ensuring accurate records.
- Receipt Capture & Mileage Tracking: Easily snap photos of receipts to categorize on the go and automatically track business mileage, simplifying expense logging and reporting.
- Comprehensive Financial Reporting: Generate detailed profit & loss, expense, and balance sheet reports to gain clear insights into your spending and overall financial performance.
Learn more about QuickBooks features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: QuickBooks stands out as a strong contender for the best expense tracking software, especially for growing SMBs. Its robust features like automated income and expense tracking, seamless receipt capture, and comprehensive financial reporting directly address pain points related to manual processes and financial visibility, helping you maintain granular control.
3. Zoho
Struggling with fragmented financial data and stalled approvals?
Zoho offers a unified cloud software suite, designed to help you break down silos between departments and increase organizational efficiency.
This means you can streamline complex business processes and ensure all your financial information resides in one accessible platform.
It’s time to gain autonomous control.
Zoho’s comprehensive platform offers powerful accounting features specifically designed for growing businesses, making it easier to track and manage expenses. This helps you gain granular control over approval processes and spend category mapping to your general ledgers.
You’ll find that Zoho provides the flexibility to customize its solutions for your unique business needs, ensuring that your expense tracking aligns perfectly with your operations. Plus, it integrates essential business functions, allowing you to streamline workflows, enhance efficiency, and ultimately drive growth at scale, without manual data entry.
The result is increased productivity and clarity.
If you’re also looking into integrated business solutions, my article on best financial CRM software covers customer management.
Key features:
- Unified cloud software: Manage your entire business in one place, breaking down departmental silos and increasing overall organizational efficiency.
- Powerful accounting platform: Specifically built for growing businesses, enabling robust financial management and the ability to track sales and investments effectively.
- Customizable solutions: Gain autonomous control to tailor Zoho for your specific business needs, ensuring seamless integration and process optimization.
Learn more about Zoho features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Zoho stands out as a strong contender for the best expense tracking software, particularly for financial managers and controllers at growing SMBs. Its unified platform and customization options simplify complex processes, potentially boosting productivity by up to 80% and consolidating all your financial data.
4. Rippling
Are you struggling with overwhelming expense options?
Rippling offers a unified platform to simplify your financial management by providing granular control over company spend. This means you can easily enforce expense policies.
Your business can automate busywork and make better decisions by managing payroll, HR, IT, and spend all in one place. Here’s how to streamline your budget control.
Eliminate manual expense tracking.
Rippling’s Spend module introduces robust expense management, corporate cards, and bill pay, all designed to give you precise control. You can enforce your company’s expense policies and control card spend with ease. The platform also allows you to generate and approve bills efficiently, ensuring every transaction aligns with your budget.
Additionally, Rippling offers Global Spend capabilities, helping you save money everywhere you operate. This integrated approach, combined with analytics and automated policies, reduces manual data entry and ensures compliance with tax regulations. The result is actionable financial insights through categorized reporting.
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Key features:
- Expense Management: Enforce company expense policies automatically, providing granular control over how and where funds are spent across your organization.
- Corporate Cards: Gain precise control over corporate card spending, allowing you to set limits and monitor transactions in real-time to prevent unauthorized expenses.
- Bill Pay: Streamline your accounts payable process by generating and approving bills efficiently, integrating seamlessly with your overall financial operations.
Learn more about Rippling features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Rippling excels as a best expense tracking software solution, empowering financial managers to centralize control over all company spend. Its unified platform, integrating expense management with corporate cards and bill pay, enables automated policy enforcement, thereby reducing manual effort and improving compliance. It’s ideal for businesses seeking comprehensive financial oversight.
5. FreshBooks
Is reconciling expenses a constant headache for your team?
FreshBooks helps you automate tracking and categorization, saving valuable time often lost to manual entry.
This means you can transform chaotic expense logs into streamlined, organized financial data.
Here’s how to simplify your budget control.
FreshBooks solves the problem of scattered financial data by bringing all your billing, payroll, and accounting into one system. This ensures you always know your real-time financial standing.
You can create professional invoices quickly, automatically adding tracked time and expenses, while also customizing payment options. Additionally, mobile receipt scanning and bank account imports automate expense capture. This comprehensive approach means less manual work and more accurate financial insights.
Furthermore, it offers double-entry accounting tools and powerful financial reports, making tax time less stressful by providing easy access for your accountant. This all-in-one approach centralizes critical financial data, improving collaboration within your team and with external partners.
The result? Significant time and money savings.
Key features:
- Automated Expense Tracking: Capture expenses effortlessly with mobile receipt scanning, bank account imports, and automated categorization, eliminating manual data entry.
- Integrated Accounting Tools: Gain real-time financial insights through double-entry accounting, comprehensive financial reports, and seamless accountant access.
- Efficient Billing and Payments: Bill clients quickly with recurring invoices, online payment options, and automated late payment reminders for faster cash flow.
Learn more about FreshBooks features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: FreshBooks stands out as a best expense tracking software, especially for SMBs seeking to streamline their financial operations. Its integrated approach to invoicing, expense management, and accounting can save your team up to 553 hours and $7000 in billable hours annually, making budgeting and compliance remarkably easier.
6. SAP Concur
Struggling with messy expense reports and budget overruns?
SAP Concur offers solutions designed to connect your financial data and help you take control of spending, streamlining processes for your growing SMB. This means you can automate your expense, travel, and AP processes, ensuring your business runs efficiently from anywhere, anytime.
You’ll discover that automating your spending processes is crucial for efficient business operations, especially when you’re aiming to replace those outdated manual methods. This deeper integration helps you avoid approval workflow stalls.
Here’s how SAP Concur delivers.
You can submit expenses from anywhere using Concur Expense, which is perfect for real-time tracking. Additionally, Concur Invoice automates and integrates your accounts payable processes, providing a comprehensive solution.
You can also capture travel expenses no matter where they are booked using Concur Travel, ensuring a complete financial picture. This holistic approach helps reduce manual data entry, providing granular controls over approval processes and category mapping to your general ledger for better insights. Plus, by automating these processes, you can streamline grant-minted expense logging and gain actionable financial insights.
The result is better budget control.
Before diving deeper, you might find my analysis of financial fraud detection software helpful for ensuring comprehensive financial security.
Key features:
- Automated Expense Submission: Allows you to submit expenses from anywhere, integrating with bank card feeds for streamlined processing and real-time tracking.
- Integrated AP Processes: Automates and connects your accounts payable with Concur Invoice, offering three-way matching and purchase requests for efficient spend management.
- Comprehensive Travel Management: Captures travel bookings from any source and integrates with budget management, ensuring complete visibility and control over travel spend.
Learn more about SAP Concur features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If you’re a financial manager or controller seeking to replace manual processes and gain real-time insights, SAP Concur stands out as the best expense tracking software. Its ability to automate expense, travel, and invoice processes, integrate with existing systems like QuickBooks and Xero, and provide robust reporting makes it an ideal choice for streamlining your budget control and ensuring compliance.
7. Wave
Struggling to manage your business expenses efficiently?
Wave offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to simplify money management, helping you track income and expenses in one place.
This means you can easily track income and expenses to manage cash flow and access reports that support smart business decisions.
Here’s how Wave streamlines your financial life.
Wave helps you tackle financial management, invoicing, and payments effortlessly. You can create professional invoices, accept various online payment methods, and make accounting easy.
This integration means less worry about scattered information, as your features are designed to work together seamlessly. Additionally, Wave’s mobile app provides on-the-go access to crucial reports, so you can keep tabs on cash flow and know who owes you, or whom you owe.
Plus, you can get support from their in-house bookkeeping, accounting, and payroll experts who can coach you or even do the work for you. The result? Peace of mind for your financial health.
Speaking of efficiency and streamlining operations, understanding robotic process automation software can further free up your team.
Key features:
- No Sweat Accounting: Easily track income and expenses, manage cash flow, and generate reports for smart business decisions, simplifying bookkeeping and tax time.
- Easy Invoicing & Payments: Create professional invoices in a few clicks and accept secure online payments via credit card, bank transfer, or Apple Pay, ensuring faster collections.
- Painless Payroll Management: Reliably pay your employees and manage contractors without the complicated legal worries, ensuring smooth payroll operations for your business.
Learn more about Wave features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Wave stands out as a strong contender for the best expense tracking software, especially for small business owners and solopreneurs. Its integrated approach to accounting, invoicing, and payroll, combined with expert support, reduces the burden of financial management, allowing you to focus on your core business.
8. Fyle
Tired of manual expense tracking chaos?
Fyle’s AI-driven platform instantly captures receipts via text, eliminating manual data entry. This means you can say goodbye to shoeboxes of receipts and tedious spreadsheets.
Your team simply texts a picture of their receipt, and Fyle’s OCR automatically extracts key data, matching it to the right transactions for faster closes. Here’s how it works.
Achieve real-time spend visibility.
Fyle solves the problem of delayed insights by integrating directly with your existing business cards—Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. This allows you to see employee expenses the moment they swipe their cards, receiving quick text alerts if a receipt is missed.
Additionally, Fyle helps you automate credit card reconciliation, eliminating hours of manual effort by collecting receipts via text and automatically matching them to the correct transactions. You can also configure budgets for projects and departments, receiving notifications when limits are exceeded. The result is effortless expense compliance, with Fyle’s platform automatically flagging out-of-policy spend based on your predefined rules, all while syncing seamlessly with your accounting system.
This ensures audit-readiness with centralized storage of all expenses.
Beyond financial insights, staying compliant is key. My guide on minimizing your audit prep time also covers crucial data regulations like GDPR.
Key features:
- AI-powered expense automation allows your team to submit receipts via text message or everyday apps, with Fyle’s AI automatically coding expenses and syncing data.
- Real-time spend visibility directly integrates with your existing business credit cards, providing instant insights into employee spending and automating reconciliation.
- Automated compliance and approvals lets you set rules to detect out-of-policy spend and configure workflows for easy manager approvals on-the-go.
Learn more about Fyle features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Fyle is the best expense tracking software if you’re a financial manager or controller at a growing SMB looking to automate receipt collection, gain real-time spend insights, and streamline accounting integrations. Its ability to collect receipts 5X faster via text, as noted by customer testimonials, significantly reduces manual effort and accelerates monthly closes.
Conclusion
Still drowning in expense reports?
It’s a huge time drain for any growing business. This outdated manual process not only slows down reimbursements but also completely clouds your financial visibility.
According to a Certify report, automation can reduce administrative tasks by 83%. That’s a massive productivity gain that you can’t ignore, freeing up your finance team for more strategic work.
This is where the right tool helps.
After my review, Expensify is the clear winner for your small enterprise. Its simple, automated approach directly solves the chaos of manual expense management.
Speaking of optimizing business processes, you might also find my guide on best email testing tools useful for your marketing efforts.
I love its automated receipt capture, which turns a simple photo into a perfect expense report. It’s the best expense tracking software for gaining real-time financial control.
I highly recommend you start a free trial of Expensify to see exactly how it transforms your workflow.
You’ll gain immediate budget clarity.
