12 Best Business Spend Management Software: Analysis of Top Solutions

Those seemingly trivial budget leaks bleed you money over time, and often, you’ll spot them when it’s too late. Your bottom line has taken the damage. Good thing, technology can preempt this classic problem and tip the scale to sound spend management.

Having the right spend management software in place prevents unnecessary costs and cushions your business against diminishing margins. What is business spend management software for but to arrest, not just misallocated funds, but the little everyday runaway costs that add up at the end of the fiscal year. The software also protects your hard-earned revenues, ensuring they are plowed back to finances for better use.

Luckily for you, there are a plethora of spend management tools out there, and you will possibly be spoilt for choice when buying one. The diversity of these products and competition amongst vendors means it easy to find a good product; the challenge is pinpointing a solution that is tailored to your business’ needs.

In this article, we’ve compiled the best business spend management software. We’ve dissected these solutions to reveal their strongest features such as procurement, purchase-to-pay, and spend management capabilities as well as the price to help you determine how effective they can be to your business. This way, you gain insights to better assess the products and pick the most appropriate software for your business.

Spend management is an all-encompassing business process that deals with how, when, and why financial resources are spent throughout the procurement and purchase-to-pay cycles. It’s the process of collecting, maintaining, collating, grouping, and analyzing spend data, to mine facts and insights that help gain the best possible value for purchased goods and services, while regulating compliance, improving efficiency, and monitoring workflows.

While the process is long and tedious, you would be mistaken to overlook the importance of spend management systems to a business. The systems automate all spend-related activities, bringing addressable spend under complete control to instigate a phenomenal impact on the organization’s competitive position and bottom-line. Apparently, a small reduction in spending can tremendously improve the profitability of your business with a degree only attainable through astronomical sales. However, you still have numerous factors to consider before getting an invoicing software or spend analysis solution for your business.

At one level, spend management sounds easy and obvious, but owing to the variety of interrelated activities it encompasses like procurement and the redundant procure-to-pay functions, achieving sound spend management can be a huge undertaking, especially if your business is spread across multiple organizational units or locations.

When the COVID-19 crisis forced many organizations to shut down or go fully remote, some businesses had to manage their spending and optimize their expenses. According to a recent report by CFO Connect and Spendesk, most businesses are likely to cut budgets for hiring, marketing, advertising, and business travel & events

Besides, the evolving supply base and the changing business strategy are piling pressure on procurement, further highlighting the need for reliable procurement software, particularly those with a business spend management software analysis feature.

Even with procurement departments under intense pressure to achieve cost savings, proper spend management has remained elusive because of the inability of organizations to collect and analyze spend data accurately. This has been so mainly because a whopping 78% of organizations have not implemented fully automated spend management systems. Consequently, many businesses are still grappling with problems such as manual invoice intervention, maverick spending, and the use of multiple disparate spend management systems that inhibit effective inventory management strategies and proper access to data.

Even worse, for businesses with operations spread across multiple business units and geographically dispersed locations, instituting processes, systems, and policies to bring business spend under control has been a major pain point. While these businesses know for a fact that having a consolidated spend management system can bring unprecedented benefits, pinpointing the right blend of virtual, decentralized, and centralized functions has been a hard nut to crack.

The good news is, even as the problems get more complex by the day, there is a proliferation of comprehensive spend management solutions designed to sufficiently address the current spend management hurdles as well as the evolving priorities. As you may notice, the products in our list have the capacity to function more specifically as different types of inventory systems, strategic sourcing, contract management, efficient invoicing, and spend visibility solutions.

Getting a reliable solution that can meet all your unique requirements starts with understanding your position and the intricacy of your problem, and then examining the 12 solutions to find one with the right functionality. Some of these products have free trials, so if you are not sure, you can test their features out before forking the money out.

Top Business Spend Management Software

1. Kissflow Procurement Cloud

Kissflow Procurement Cloud is a web-based spend management solution that offers a range of tools to help you stay on top of your procurement processes. With its end-to-end spend management capabilities, the software lets you manage purchase requests, orders, and invoices and provides visibility into your expense data.

The solution also facilitates careful collection of financial records, enabling you to make sense of all relevant information and documents even if they’re scattered throughout email, forms, and excel sheets.

Another advantage of using Kissflow Procurement Cloud is how it provides in-depth control in your expense processes. For instance, the solution allows you to configure rules and approval workflows for each of your financial transactions. This helps you prevent reckless spending and instead save money for legitimate expenses.

Additionally, Kissflow Procurement Cloud ensures faster and smoother procurement operations. By eliminating manual processes, the system accelerates spend management for your business. Following a set of rules and compliance regulations, it automatically approves the transactions you make and ensure that everything is in order for your purchases.

Price Range: Kissflow Procurement Cloud starts at $1,990/month.

Key Features of Kissflow Procurement Cloud

1. Its procurement module facilitates guided buying.
2. Its supplier management module provides tools to manage supplier qualifications and collaboration.
3. Other notable features include shipping, order management, and reports.

2. GEP Smart

GEP Smart is an industry-leading supply chain management application with enterprise-grade features that you can use to optimize spend and drive value to your business. The solution comes with an array of spend management tools to help you manage your procurement processes from end-to-end. These include spend analysis, category management, contract management, procure-to-pay, and savings tracking features.

Moreover, GEP Smart offers real-time spend visibility, enabling you to stay on top of your spend trends and savings opportunities. With the software’s supply chain visibility and execution tools, you can have a complete and end-to-end view of your supply chain performance. GEP Smart also allows you to manage your inventory right from logistics to your warehouse operations.

Another handy feature of GEP Smart is its spend planning function, which allows you to establish and follow an estimated spend and savings targets. It also facilitates collaboration with your entire team so you can easily build, track, and manage your spend and savings pipeline.

Price Range: To purchase GEP Smart, you can request a quote from the vendor.

GEP SMART

Try out GEP SMART with their free trial

Key Features of GEP Smart

1. GEP Smart’s should-cost analysis tool allows you to get ahead of price variations and market fluctuations.
2. The software also comes with predictive analytics and market-index based forecasting.
3. It comes with a centralized communication system for easier collaboration with clients and other stakeholders.

3. Bellwether

Bellwether is an easy to use purchasing software designed to help small, mid-sized businesses, and large enterprises gain control over spending, reduce operational costs, and improve regulatory compliance. The solution offers a purchasing manager that features components for procurement management, inventory management, vendor performance optimization, and invoice management.

The best thing about Bellwether is that it’s available for both cloud-based and on-premise deployment, which makes it fit for both online stores and brick-and-mortar enterprises. Its web-based version is particularly effective as it provides the customization and flexibility required to manage business spending. What makes Bellwether unique, though, is that it is available to an unlimited number of users and its world-class customer support is available on the phone, live chat, and email.

You can see for yourself how this solution could improve your spend management once you sign up for a Bellwether free trial.

Another plus for Bellwether is that it instills greater transparency into business spending allowing businesses to gain control of spending and remove maverick purchasing. Also, its purchasing module works in tandem with the requisition module, allowing you to establish a budget threshold and spend tolerances.

Price Range: Bellwether offers straightforward pricing with three plans: PXM is free, BPM prices start at $30/user/month, and EPMX prices start at $40/user/month.

Key Features of Bellwether

1. Its requisitions feature eliminates the need for paper, email, and spreadsheet requisitions.
2. Its approval module makes it easy to define approvals and gain control of spending.
3. It comes with a purchasing module designed to improve efficiency and save money.

4. Paramount Workplace

Paramount Workplace offers requisition, procurement, and spend management tools for businesses of all scales. The software is known for its capabilities in guiding businesses in purchasing decisions, reducing processing costs, and ensuring efficiency of procurement processes. Additionally, Paramount Workplace allows small to large enterprises to boost mobile and web procurement.

Ideal for businesses that handle traveling expenses on a regular basis, the software offers a range of spend management features to optimize travel and business expenses. It lets you implement corporate spend management regulations with ease, enabling you to create, submit, and approve business expenses in no time.

Additionally, Paramount Workplace allows you to handle your company’s corporate travel management processes. For instance, you can book travel dates for your employees and set different policies for each unique traveler. You can also take full control of traveler spend by setting rules and alerts for lower fares and rates.

Price Range: Paramount Workplace is available by quote.

Key Features of Paramount Workplace

1. It lets you manage travel expenses for your company with its full tracking, audit, and expense control features.
2. It uses PCI-Compliance and privacy-shield certification to ensure the safety of your data.
3. You can upload, monitor, and match travel receipts to ensure the accuracy of your travel expense reports.

5. Procurify

Procurify is a cloud-based spend management solution designed to help medium to large organizations get the most out of their spending. The solution provides tools that help businesses achieve greater visibility into their spend, monitor purchases, and report on the financial data with pinpoint accuracy.

Procurify is billed as an accessible and convenient solution, and its availability on both desktop and mobile devices justifies this claim. Its mobile interface is particularly helpful for users that want to track approval and manage business spending even when on the go. The best part is that whether you are completing a task on your desktop or mobile device, Procurify offers the same flawless experience.

If you want to investigate Procurify features closely, you can easily do so when you sign up for Procurify free trial.

No more email or spreadsheet to manage your approvals, with Procurify, its a breeze to create customizable approval flows that suite your requirements. Also, the ability to view the real-time budget impact and notifications means you can approve requests more confidently and in a timely fashion.

Besides, the real-time budget tracking feature, allows you to keep your spending in check and make accurate decisions based on your company’s goals. More importantly, Procurify’s expense management enables you to put maverick spend under complete control.

What’s more intriguing is the spend analytics and reporting module. The module provides simple reporting graphics revealing trends of how money flows out of your business. With the graphics, it’s easy to pinpoint what is purchased and who is spending, ultimately curtailing maverick spending.

Price Range: Procurify offers detailed pricing with three quote-based plans. Contact the vendor for a detailed price quote.

Key Features of Procurify

1. It offers customizable approvals that can be designed to suit unique requirements.
2. It streamlines sourcing, purchasing, and receiving of items.
3. It comes with a robust budget tracking tool that enables you to see what is left in your coffers.
4. Its expense management tools make it easy to control spending.
5. It has an analytics and reporting module that delivers helpful insights into spending.

6. Precoro

Precoro is a reliable spend management tool that helps you stay in control of your expenses and procurement processes. Ideal for small to medium-sized businesses, the software provides a single, unified system where you can manage your procurement operations, from keeping track of orders and invoices to analyzing costs and expenses.

Another benefit of using Precoro is it eliminates error-prone manual work by automating your procurement workflows. It lets you designate your own approval workflow, enabling a faster delivery of needed products and services for your business. In addition, Precoro lets you coordinate purchasing processes and ensures that everything about your procurement is in order.

Precoro also comes with a set of analytics and reporting features to help you optimize financial and operational decisions for your business. It lets you create detailed and custom reports using its customizable fields and visualization tools. Moreover, Precoro makes it easier for you to find relevant information in the unified system.

Price Range: Precoro starts at $35/user/month.

Key Features of Precoro

1. Its budget management tool allows you to allocate expenses to your team.
2. Precoro provides real-time access and updates to your financial data.
3. Through system integrations, you can export data to your existing accounting software.

7. Tradogram

Tradogram is a powerful, cloud-based business spend management solution designed to help businesses of all sizes implement effective spend control strategies. It is a comprehensive solution that blends six powerful modules: contract management, supplier management, strategic sourcing, order management, spend control, and purchase-to-pay. The solution is designed for business leaders that want to remain in complete control of their procurement process and discover the future of spend management.

What makes Tradogram stand out as a spend management software is its impressive suite of spend control solution. The suite includes a budget planner that enables businesses to control their finances and perform cost forecasting to discover potential savings opportunities. Besides, with Tradogram, it’s a breeze to create dynamic approval workflow systems that improve the company’s spending. Even better, the solution has reliable spend analysis tools that make it easy to perform cost tracking in real-time.

Tradogram offers a free plan that you can use right away. If you just want to see how it work for a time without fully committing, you can easily sign up for Tradogram free trial.

If your goal is to streamline purchase orders, requisitions, contracts, RFQs/RFPs, invoice matching, or delivery tracking, Tradogram has got you covered. The platform puts sourcing events, purchasing process, and supply chain management in sync, enabling companies to improve spend visibility and ultimately, their bottom line. Also, with its versatile procurement features, ease of use, and flexibility, Tradogram is an ideal solution for businesses looking to create custom-made procurement workflows.

Tradogram also makes use of the latest cloud technology to empower purchasing decision makers as well as buyers to control costs, manage suppliers, and save money. Another great thing about Tradogram is that the platform offers a real-time messaging system to help users request relevant information and mitigate the risk of broken communication with suppliers.

Price Range: Tradogram is a low-priced solution that offers sensible subscription-based pricing with straightforward plans. Its free forever basic plan is best for startups and its Premium plan only costs $10/user/month, which makes it perfect for small businesses.

Key Features of Tradogram

1. It provides on-off feature controls that make it easy to customize the procurement process to suit a business’ needs.
2. It is equipped with an inventory feature that makes it easy to build a distribution channel, set reorder points, and track stock items.
3. It has a centralized system for requisitions
4. It supports one-click receipt scanning to streamline expense tracking.
5. It supports three-way invoice matching.
6. It has robust delivery tracking tools for precise order receiving and timely deliveries.
7. It comes with reliable purchase order features that streamline purchasing workflow.

8. Tipalti Approve

Tipalti Approve is an easy-to-use spend management tool that allows business and finance teams to gain control and visibility into their expenses. It has plenty of customization tools that let you configure procurement workflows for your organization. It also allows you to deploy your own purchase order system, requisition processes, and procurement approvals.

Moreover, Tipalti Approve modernizes your vendor onboarding processes to speed up your purchases and transactions. By automating your vendor onboarding workflow, you can ensure a smoother and faster process for reviewing, verifying, and approving vendors.

The solution also replaces emails and spreadsheets when it comes to collecting vendor information. This is made possible using Tipalti Approve’s branded web forms to collect data from your vendors. By using the system, you can minimize duplicate vendors and manual typing.

Price Range: Tipalti Approve is available by quote.

Key Features of Tipalti Approve

1. Tipalti Approve provides you with a detailed audit log that lets you see every action your team makes throughout your procurement lifecycle.
2. This solution is fully customizable so you can create your own procurement workflows.
3. Tipalti Approve also allows you to configure approval flows for your purchase requests.

9. PayEm

PayEm is a global spend and procurement platform that helps finance teams automate and connect their processes into a single platform. This end-to-end solution control and transparency over their financial processes. With PayEm, finance teams can manage corporate spending on a global scale, ensure that payments run smoothly, and equip employees with the capability to manage non-payroll spending. The user base of the software includes CEOs, CFOs, VPs of Finance, VPs of Procurement, controllers, accountants, bookkeepers, and employees.

As a spend management platform, the core features of PayEm include dedicated virtual cards for vendors, budget limits and notifications, and subscription management. Companies can issue virtual or physical cards that are customizable, convenient, and capable of real-time budget management. PayEm also makes the reimbursement process simpler as it features customizable approval flows and reimbursement requests through a mobile app that can be synced with the NetSuite accounting software. These are all on top of other features for fund requests, bills payment, AP automation, procurement, reconciliation, and cross-border payments.

PayEm has a mobile app for iOS and Android that lets users request funds, pay on any shared cards, and upload receipts. PayEm can be integrated with NetSuite which allows for speedy multi-currency transaction reconciliation, seamless procurement processes, and automatic amortizations.

Price Range: PayEm pricing is provided on a by-quote basis.

Key Features of PayEm

1. Its account payable capabilities allow you to send payments to more than 200 territories in 130 different currencies.
2. Its spend management capabilities help subsidiaries be financially independent while following processes at a global level.
3. Other notable features include corporate cards, reimbursement, and fund requests.

10. AvidXchange

AvidXchange is an all-inclusive account payable and automated bill payment designed for mid-sized businesses spanning numerous verticals such as financial services, real estate, energy, construction, and nonprofit. The solution automates invoicing and payment processing while accelerating approvals to minimize processing costs. Its aim is to empower businesses to automate the AP process to eliminate manual processes and achieve more transparency and control.

AvidXchange focuses on helping organizations streamlining the entire Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) process from purchasing to payment with tools such as bill services, invoice application, purchase order application, and pay application. This way, the solution ensures organizations achieve optimal spending, enhanced reporting, and better budgeting across all departments.

should you want to investigate the platform firsthand, you can easily do so when you sign up for AvidXchange free trial.

Price Range: AvidXchange pricing is available upon request. Contact the vendor for detailed price information.

Key Features of AvidXchanage

1. It has a powerful purchase order module.
2. It comes with an invoice module designed to streamline invoicing and expedite the approval process.
3. Its payment module allows you to pay suppliers with ease.

11. SAP SRM

SAP Supplier Relation Management (SRM) is a web-based procurement software designed to accelerate the Procure-to-Pay process. SAP SRM enables businesses of all sizes to procure different types of goods including direct & indirect materials as well as services. With the solution, businesses get the tools they need to streamline and automate purchasing with a goal to lower supply costs and maintain high-quality output.

SAP SRM coordinates diverse business processes including supplier management, purchasing, sourcing, spend analysis, and operational procurement. When the loop, from source to pay, is closed and operational processes are automated, it becomes easy for businesses to increase efficiency and cut unnecessary spending.

In addition, by systematizing the acquisition of goods and services, SAP SRM accelerates procurement cycle times and enables business managers to gain greater visibility into the performance and relationships of their suppliers. The best part about SAP SRM is that it offers consumer-grade shopping interfaces that make it easy to drive user adoption.

Price Range: SAP SRM offers quote-based pricing. Contact the vendor to get a custom quote based on the functionality and number of users you need.

Key Features of SAP SRM

1. It facilitates plan-driven procurement.
2. It comes with a catalog management module build to simplify supplier management.
3. It has a procure-to-pay optimization tool for enforcing the best practices in procurement.
4. It comes with centralized sourcing to increasing visibility into enterprise-wide demands.
5. It integrates with SAP Fiori to give your workforce a seamless user experience.

12. SellerCloud

SellerCloud is a robust sales management software built to help mid-sized and large multi-channel merchants sell everywhere. Boasting seamless integrations with more sales channels than other providers, the solution enables merchants to establish a foothold in virtually all leading marketplaces.

In addition, it provides a single-source platform where every facet of merchandise flow, from purchasing to the delivery, is managed with ease. This way, every aspect of your business operation, from pricing to order processing to warehousing and shipping, is expediently and conveniently done to the advantage of the business and the customer as well. The integration of all interrelated activities brings an optimum level of control to the company’s spending and boosts the bottom line.

What makes SellerCloud a force to reckon with is its diversity of advanced functions. For example, the solution provides a multi-warehouse feature built primarily for businesses operating multiple warehouses. This feature aggregates all inventory, allowing merchants to track inventory across the company’s warehouse from a single platform and in real-time. Even better if any SellerCloud feature comes off as basic, you can leverage the web service API to create your own app to expand or boost the functionality of this software.

Price Range: SellerCloud pricing is available only upon request. Feel free to contact the vendor for detailed pricing information.

Key Feature of SellerCloud

1. It comes with a catalog feature that offers a single entry point for product specifications.
2. Its inventory management module automates and simplifies inventory management.
3. It has a purchasing module designed to streamline all purchasing procedures.
4. It comes with a multichannel management module with integration with Amazon FBA.

Important: Test the Spend Management Software First

There you have it: our analysis of the 12 best spend management solutions. We’ve given you the price range of each product to help you zero in on software that is within your budget. Hopefully, after analyzing your needs and reading our guide you now have an idea of your ideal spend management solution in mind.

If you still can’t make the final decision, relax, we’ve got you covered. Our experts put all these products to test, and Kissflow Procurement Cloud came out on top in terms of spend management capabilities. We highly recommend this platform for its comprehensive suite of finance operation solutions including invoicing and purchase request management. Overall, Kissflow Procurement Cloud will help you structure your company’s spending, centralize accounts payable processes, and manage reimbursement and fund requests.

You can also check out our guide to effective cost control and spend management.

By James Anthony

A senior FinancesOnline writer on SaaS and B2B topics, James Anthony passion is keeping abreast of the industry’s cutting-edge practices (other than writing personal blog posts on why Firefly needs to be renewed). He has written extensively on these two subjects, being a firm believer in SaaS to PaaS migration and how this inevitable transition would impact economies of scale. With reviews and analyses spanning a breadth of topics from software to learning models, James is one of FinancesOnline’s most creative resources on and off the office.