If your business hasn’t already banished paper travel expense reports, now is the right time. The best travel and expense management software is a scalable solution that simplifies the process and combines automated mobile device travel expense reporting software for employees and expense report approvals with AI-driven, cloud-based AP automation software for complete business spend management.
Using travel and expense automation software results in faster intake, recording, and reimbursement of T&E expenses and better travel management expense control.
This article describes common corporate travel and expense management challenges and solutions, including the best travel and expense management software combined with accounts payable automation software.
What is Travel and Expense Management Software?
Travel and expense management software is a solution that lets businesses control employee spending on travel expenses and entertainment by approving or rejecting digitally prepared expense reports (with data extracted from photos of spending receipts) and reimbursing employees for their allowed business-related expenses.
How Can T&E Management Sofware Help Solve Common Challenges?
Some common employee travel expense challenges include:
- Employee delays in preparing and submitting expense reports, resulting in unrecorded expenses at month-end close and unpredictable cash flow forecasting
- Employee credit card bills are due before reimbursement is received, hurting morale
- Expensive and time-consuming manual expense report processing
- Losing paper expense reports during the long processing cycle
- Expense report errors
- Personal employee expenses not detected
- Bottlenecks and delays in the company approvals and payment process
- Approval of some expenses not complying with company policy and IRS business deduction rules
- Paper expense report storage costs
Travel expense management software helps solve common T&E challenges by:
- Enabling quick employee preparation of expense reports with receipt photos, using a mobile device app while still traveling
- Automatically extracting expense data from receipt images with OCR
- Using automated verification processes for
- Company policy compliance
- Error and fraud detection
- Guiding approvals via mobile app or Internet, reducing bottleneck delays
- Giving employees the choice of a quicker electronic payment method in their local currency
- Providing better visibility of expenses by category and cash flow requirements
Tipalti makes travel and expense management work better and faster.
Tipalti Expenses + AP automation software works with your ERP to quicken and improve employee expense report submission and processing.
The 5 Best Travel and Expense Management Software Solutions
The top travel and expense management software provider solutions holistically combine expense claim/employee expense reimbursement and expense approval software with AP automation as integrations with your ERP or accounting software.
Tipalti
User-friendly Tipalti Expenses + AP automation software accelerates digital employee T&E expense receipts submission, approvals, and global payments, including payment reconciliation. Your company can also apply to use and integrate employee-issued corporate spending cards called Tipalti Card (with automatic payment reconciliation). You’ll get spend controls by category to achieve a complete spend management program with visibility.
Overview
Employees submit their expense reports in their mobile device app or through the desktop software to capture receipts in real-time and provide payment information with a choice of payment methods and local currency. OCR/AI technology extracts the data fields from expense receipt photos to prepare the electronic expense claim.
Automatic general ledger coding is performed after ensuring compliance with the company expense policies of each subsidiary and corporate office and checking for errors. Approvers can use a button to approve or reject expenses from their mobile device or the cloud-based software.
After approval, the company makes electronic global payments in large batches for efficiency. Tipalti automatically reconciles the payment batch to the general ledger, saving your company time and accelerating the financial close.
Tipalti Expenses is employee-friendly, making it easy for your employees to quickly submit their expense claims. Corporate card integration makes this a comprehensive solution for all employee expenses, whether reimbursed or charged directly to your company on a spending card.
Tipalti offers employees a choice of 6 payment methods in 196 countries and 120 local currencies for reimbursement, including ACH in the U.S., global ACH, PayPal, prepaid debit cards, wire transfers, and checks, with more payment methods to be introduced soon. Tipalti lets companies split fees with employees or suppliers to encourage using cost-effective payment methods.
Because you’re using Tipalti AP automation software combined with Tipalti Expenses, your payables and finance teams will gain efficiency and cost savings when making all your supplier payments, leading the way in digital transformation and cloud spend management. Tipalti automation software provides an audit trail for expense tracking that’s useful for your company’s accounts payable audit.
Best for established small businesses, medium-sized, and enterprise companies experiencing growth and needing spend management with scalability for company growth.
Price range $$ – $$$: The Tipalti platform starts at $129 per month. Your company needs Tipalti Expenses for travel and expense management combined with Tipalti AP automation and can also consider Tipalti’s other finance automation software products. Request a custom quote for automation software that meets your current business needs. Your company can later upgrade Tipalti as you need more features and your business complexity increases.
Standout features
Tipalti Expenses + AP automation software standout features include expense policy compliance and spend management analysis and controls, including Ask Pi virtual digital assistant in AP automation, with built-in Chat GPT-4 generative AI integration and other artificial intelligence for spend queries.
Tipalti AP automation software includes multiple features and advantages, including self-service supplier onboarding through a supplier portal submitting W-9 or W-8 tax forms before first payment, supplier validation to prevent fraud, global payments tracking, 1099 and 1042-S preparation reports, error flagging, automated approvals, and global regulatory compliance.
Ramp
Ramp provides travel expense management solutions, accounts payable, and spend management through its T&E expense submission and approval mobile app and AP automation software. Ramp offers global corporate spending cards for your employees.
Overview
Ramp T&E functionality works with the Ramp corporate card to control employee spending from both sources with spending limits, merchants, categories, and built-in expense policies.
Ramp lets employees make memo notes indicating the expense purpose when submitting expense receipt photos. Ramp includes automatic expense coding, error-checking, and approvals from within the app.
Ramp uses AI and summarizes real-time spending in a dashboard that filters by all or each payment type. Besides T&E expense reimbursements, Ramp accounts payable automation software is also used for making global vendor payments.
Best for startups and businesses of all sizes seeking a complete expense management solution without traditional expense reports.
Price range $ – $$$$: Ramp has three pricing plans: a free Ramp subscription plan, the Ramp Plus $15 per user per month (billed annually) SaaS pricing plan, and the Ramp Enterprise plan with custom pricing. Ramp Plus adds granular controls and customization for scaling global expansion. Ramp Enterprise adds enhanced security and compliance and dedicated customer support.
Standout features
Ramp has real-time AI-driven spend management dashboards and pre-authorized employee expense controls.
Airbase
Airbase offers an expense management module and accounts payable automation software that combine.
Overview
Airbase offers touchless travel and expense management software that takes over when an employee takes a T&E receipt photo in the Airbase mobile app. OCR technology extracts data from the photo, automatically assigns a purpose based on past patterns, and enables approval, and payment. Employees can choose to save their receipt photos for later submission.
Airbase checks employees for timely expense submission and compliance with company policy. If deviations are detected, Airbase will flag the exception and block employees until they make necessary expense submission corrections.
Best for companies of all sizes seeking employee expense reimbursement automation.
Price range $$ – $$$: Airbase offers custom pricing for its Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans
Standout features
Airbase uses generative AI to assign a receipt purpose for touchless employee expense reimbursement and management after the Airbase mobile app receipt photo is taken.
SAP Concur
SAP Concur combines travel and expense management solutions that include Concur Expense, Concur Invoice, and Concur Travel software solutions in the expense management process.
Overview
SAP Concur Expense management software is the oldest T&E software product in the field that lets employees submit receipts through a mobile device for automated electronic expense submission, approval workflows, expense reimbursement, and corporate travel management.
Best for larger companies with a higher budget needing travel and expense management software, including a travel booking tool.
Price range $$ – $$$$: SAP Concur provides custom price quotes for its SaaS software and includes a charge for preparing each expense report, unlike other travel expense management software products that only charge per user per month. Also, check for extra fees like ERP connection charges.
Standout features
Concur users can integrate Concur Travel software with its Concur Expense and Concur Invoice (AP automation) software to let employees perform business travel booking in a controlled platform environment.
BILL
The BILL travel expense report software for expense reimbursement is BILL’s accounts payable software for bill pay combined with its Spend & Expense features.
Overview
Employees of BILL customers email their expense reports with receipts attached to their BILL inbox, enter the expense report bill in the system for an existing or new employee vendor, and enter invoice date, invoice amount, due date, GL account coding, and the approver name.
Best for small businesses needing a simple solution without comprehensive features.
Price range $ – $$: BILL Spend & Expense software features are free but the AP automation software has SaaS subscription pricing. The BILL Corporate SaaS plan pricing for accounts payable and accounts receivable is $79 per user per month. The BILL Enterprise plan has custom pricing for additional syncing features and multi-entity and multi-location capabilities with priority support.
Standout features
BILL provides mobile app spend control and automatic expense receipt matching, although its expense reimbursement requires manual data entry when employees email expense reports.
How to Choose the Best T&E Software for Your Business
Follow these steps to select the best T&E software for your business.
#1 Review Company Expense Policies and Compare to IRS Guidelines for Business Expenses
The travel and expense software that you’re ideally seeking will automatically detect whether expense reports comply with company policies for employee expenses and its business travel policy. Therefore, the first step is ensuring that each company expense policy is up-to-date and incorporates IRS Business Expense requirements for business deductions.
#2 Map Expense Reimbursement Workflow
T&E management software should streamline workflow and automate your expense reimbursement processes to let your team gain productivity and speed up recording and reimbursement. Therefore, you need to understand and document your current processes step by step to determine where bottlenecks are occurring, and streamlining will help.
#3 Determine Business Requirements for Travel and Expense Reports
Your expense report policy and goals should include the number of days by which travel and expense reports must be submitted by employees after their business trips, how quickly expense reports will be processed and approved for payment, and the number of days by which the company will make a payment to reimburse the employee for business expenses.
#4 Seek a Solution for Centralized Expense Report Document Management
In your travel and expense management software evaluation process, expect a solution that captures receipts from photos, extracts data into fields to create an expense report claim, and stores the information in a centralized document repository.
#5 Ensure the Solution Checks Company Policy Compliance
The employee expenses automation software should include a step that automatically checks the expense for company policy compliance by setting payment rules that would detect and trigger an exception.
Look for a travel and expense management system that lets you determine compliance with multiple expense policies, using unique travel expense policies for each separate subsidiary. Because sometimes decentralization is the best way to manage your corporation.
#6 Find a Global Reimbursement Solution
Many companies have both domestic and international employees. Global employees expect to be paid quickly in their country, with a choice of payment methods in their local currency. The selected payment method must meet their needs and be cost-effective.
#7 Seek Mobile Devices and Cloud Software
Your company’s travel and expense management solution must include iOS and Android mobile device input for submitting receipts requiring reimbursement and providing a fast approval process. To enable approvals anywhere, anytime, you must give your approvers the choice of completing mobile device or cloud software expense report reviews to approve or reject claimed expenses.
This expense management tool access feature prevents bottlenecks from approvers not being available to approve paper-based expense reports until they’re physically at the office.
#8 Find a Scalable and Comprehensive Automation Solution
As your company expands through growth initiatives, it needs a scalable T&E management solution that will work for a larger company. An automation solution for expenses should be combined with AP automation software to get the full benefit of end-to-end payables that also processes and pays electronic supplier invoices.
A comprehensive solution includes travel and expense report management, supplier invoice processing, and ease of use for global payments, with spend visibility.
Conclusion
For travel and expense management software, Tipalti offers a scalable, modern travel and expense management system called Tipalti Expenses that integrates with your ERP or accounting software and Tipalti AP automation software to provide a complete solution with spend visibility and control.
Tipalti Card is a physical and virtual spending card that controls employee expenses without requiring reimbursement. Corporate spending card management establishes spending limits by category and employee. The combined Tipalti AP automation and expense management platform solution will reduce total accounts payables processing time by 80% and let your company reduce hiring needs. Schedule a demo to optimize employee expenses and accounts payable through cost-saving automation.
