Best Spend Management Software 2025

What is Spend Management Software?

Spend management software allows organizations to centralize visibility, approval, and tracking of business spending. Spending management includes both employee expenses and vendor payments, among other miscellaneous business spending. Spend management software helps businesses identify trends and improve spending efficiency across the organization by automating spending control policies where needed.

Spend management software bridges the gap between process-specific financial tools, like procurement software, and core systems like accounting platforms. Spend management software helps centralize spending data to give businesses a single source of truth on where, when, and how it is spending money. This functionality is particularly impactful for organizations that have traditionally siloed this data into different teams, departments, or business units, limiting the finance team’s visibility.

Spend Management vs. Expense Management

Spend management is often conflated with expense management. However, they are distinct, if related, software categories. Spend management is a broader process that spans across the organization. It touches on spending instances from materials procurement and logistics payments to individual employee spending requests.The goal of the software is to provide a holistic view into how the business spends money.

In contrast, expense management software is primarily focused on tracking and reimbursing individual employee expenses, and heavily overlaps with elements of travel management software. Spend management software often includes expense management capabilities, supported by features like corporate cards. However, expense management is only a subset of the functionality that spend management software can offer.

Spend Management Software Features & Capabilities

Spend management software will offer a range of features based on the target user base and use cases. However, every spend management product will at least have all or nearly all of these features:

• Central view of spending data from across the organization
• Spending request and approval workflows
• Corporate cards
• Spending controls
• Accounts Payable/Bill payment automation
• Spend reporting, including historical views and individual drilldown
• Integrations with other financial systems, such as ERP platforms, procurement tools, and accounting systems

Spend Management Software Comparison

When comparing spend management products, consider these factors:

• Reporting: All spend management software should include robust and customizable reporting features. Consider both the value of any prebuilt dashboard overviews and drill-down capabilities each product offers, as well as the ease of customizing these views.
• Document capture/management: A core part of spend management is centralizing the system of record for spending across the organization. Consider how easy to use each product is, especially for end-users capturing receipts, invoices, or less structured spending documentation.
• Automation: What manual processes are eating up the most time and resources for the business? Work with vendors to get demos of how they can automate those processes for you in addition to general automation capabilities. There are also some instances of proactive automation, such as recommending efficiencies and best practices the business isn’t currently leveraging.

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Pricing Information

Spend management software is usually priced on a per user, per month basis. Pricing often starts at $5-10/user/month and can scale up to $30+/user/month depending on the volume of users, cash flow, and level of integrations and vendor support. Some vendors also offer free versions of their software for personal or small business spend management. However, growing organizations are likely to quickly scale beyond any free plans.