Bento for Business vs. Negotiatus

Our organization runs a lot of short-term or one-off programs where the program staff need to buy supplies -- Bento is perfect for these scenarios. The staff who make the purchases are not staff who would typically have a company card, so we wanted a solution other than giving them a credit card. Bento was perfect because it makes the purchasing & bookkeeping processes for these programs easy and efficient for both the staff and the finance team

Incentivized

Negotiatus is well suited for multi-location--many locations doing the same thing, such as a franchise model. However, if you really want to have tight control on costing, the reporting is not robust enough that, with scale, it would make more sense to bring this in house and create your own vendor relationships

Incentivized

• Track expenses by employee
• Restrict purchases based on amount and category
• Import transactions directly into QuickBooks

Incentivized

• Consolidated invoicing--Negotiatus consolidates all invoices into one monthly invoice for us to pay by the 15th of the subsequent month.
• General ledger mapping--products on the platform can be mapped to one or more entities or cost centers through a monthly consolidated file, which has great value when it comes to process efficiency.
• Ease of use--the platform is fairly easy for both users and administrators. With many locations that are geographically dispersed, it allows us to manage purchasing without an excess training need.

Incentivized

• easier way for employees to access their statements without setting them up as admins
• monthly statements generated by card
• monthly fee needs to be added to one of the card statements

Incentivized

• Communicating Savings: Negotiatus sells itself on its vendor network--the ability to search for the best possible price according to what is available. However, it is challenging to tell what that savings would have been (e.g., WB Mason vs. Amazon).
• Speed of Resolution: it sometimes takes a few months to come to a resolution when it comes to analysis/reporting. As they do not have great reporting around savings, we often ask for them to provide some periodic analysis. The account manager will put in the request, but it may not get completed or be up to the appropriate standard due to lack of understanding of the requirements.
• Cancelled Orders: at some points early on (2+ years ago), many of the orders were cancelled and we were left scrambling to replace them. That has gotten much better.

Incentivized

If you are looking for prepaid business care or a business expense card, I highly do not recommend using Bento for Business. Do yourself and your business a favor and use a more customer service orientated services such as Pex, Wex, or Expensify. Bento for Business is bad business. Just don't do it.

• Saving time by eliminating reimbursements
• Allowing many staff to have a card to make purchases without worrying about financial control/risk of too many people having a company card
• Efficiently synchs with Quickbooks

Incentivized

• Positive efficiencies (major positive)
• Negative monthly costs per location
• Positive control

Incentivized