U.S. Bank Spend Management vs. Zip Intake-to-Procure

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

Zip can be used for routing all vendor-level approvals for new vendors and all renewals across our organization. It can also be helpful for managing all purchases from existing vendors. For non-spend related approvals, it’s not as well suited. Zip was definitely designed for procurement workflows. They also have a vendor management portal that links up directly to something like NetSuite for management and visibility.

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

Incentivized

• No coding - Ability for the administrator to make changes without development resources helps us be agile as a procurement org.
• Visibility to the user in a great user interface
• Accountability (helps us track SLAs on response time), Audit trails keeping track of everything
• The implementation team was incredible, as is ongoing support. They want you to succeed in your goals vs. just implement their tool

• 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

• There are some duplicated fields such as anticipated total spend vs. price line item breakdown that asks for the same thing. This is a little bit tedious
• Does not show which invoices got processed and applied to open POs
• Does not integrate / migrate special custom fields within Zip Intake-to-Procure into other tech stacks (NetSuite)

Incentivized

Incredibly responsive and helpful.

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.

I prefer Zip for its for its user-friendly interface and ease of adoption, especially if the organization values a simpler and more intuitive system for users across various departments. Comparatively, Zip is a more budget-friendly solution compared to some enterprise-level systems like SAP ARIBA or Oracle PeopleSoft, especially for smaller or mid-sized organizations with specific procurement needs.

Incentivized

• 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

• Visibility for all necessary approvers and reviewers of the process.
• Lack of open API to other systems (i.e Mondays, Smartsheet) is causing concerns for team that might want to move away from current tool.
• No 3rd party implementation required is huge cost / time savings.

Incentivized