Best Spend Management Software for 2023

Spend Management Software: A Buyer Guide

Spend management software simplifies tracking, reporting, and management of business expenses. It integrates and automates all spend-related activities, providing a centralized source of expense information.

Spend management software helps control spending through rules and workflows for payment approvals. In addition, analysis of historical data enables companies to identify spending trends, thereby improving their accounting and avoiding overspending.

Saving money and cutting costs are two goals all companies strive for. An expense management system can help organizations understand their spending and identify opportunities to lower procurement costs on services, raw materials, and supplies.

It can be challenging to identify the best spend management software among all the options on the market. This guide explains what to look for when choosing to spend management software solutions.

Spend Management Platform: Why is it important?

In the long run, companies may leave themselves open to financial leaks and revenue losses without real-time visibility and control overspending. Therefore, businesses that realize this risk and want it mitigated utilize efficient spend management software to automate the process.

It not only identifies opportunities for cost savings but also reduces unnecessary overhead. Visualizing and understanding business spend and supplier relationships within the source-to-pay process can drive tremendous value to an organization that uses a business spend management platform to manage all supplier-related activities digitally.

Spend Management vs. Expense Management

Expense Management

The purpose of expense management software is to track and reimburse individual employee expenses, and it heavily overlaps with elements of travel management software.

A good expense management process ensures that your team will be reimbursed for paid expenses on time and if they pay for expenses themselves.

Spend Management

The functionality of spend management software includes expense management, which is supported by functions like corporate cards. This includes online subscriptions, payments made with company cards, and employee expense reports.

Spend Management Software: Things to Consider While Purchasing

Spend management is becoming a vital part of organizations of all sizes. We're not referring to online bookkeeping; we're referring to modern, automated processes for companies to make their spending more efficient.

Business growth makes it increasingly complex for businesses to track financial operations accurately. However, with the growing availability of spend management software, all of these transactional processes can increasingly be automated, offering a variety of strategic, operational, and financial advantages.

The following three key points should be considered when choosing to spend management software:

• Flexibility - To deal with intelligent spend software, it is essential that the software you use adapt to stakeholders' needs. A rigid tool or a tool that is limited in its functionality may limit teams' ability to accomplish all of the functions they need.

• Customization - Flexible solutions also include a customized workflow. To achieve a seamless, supportive process, teams should customize their workflows. A customized workflow should also be flexible enough to adapt to changing times in a growing company.

• Streamlined User Experience: If your team is using a new tool, you want them to take advantage of it right away and use it with ease.

Many different features and variations are involved in spending management tools, and if the user experience is lacking, employees might avoid using valuable features entirely.

Spend Management Software: Why Companies Need It!

Consider these five reasons why your procurement team should use spend management software:

1. Improved Process Efficiency

With an end-to-end spend management system, you can optimize the entire source-to-pay process, including spend analysis, strategic sourcing, and supplier relationship management, and boost your procurement team's ability to drive strategic initiatives.

2. Spend Compliance Increases

Spend management software allows you to control more spending and ensure approved contracts and proper approvals are used when making purchases. In addition, users can purchase through pre-approved online catalogs without filling out paperwork.

3. A Better Understanding of Spend

Besides increasing spend visibility, accountability, and cross-functional collaboration, enterprise spend management software enables access to consumer information for users across the enterprise.

4. Effective Risk Management

Risk is best mitigated by identifying it in advance and taking preemptive measures before it occurs. Spend management systems can identify risks through detailed analysis of supply market trends, contracts, and supplier performance scorecards.

5. Mobility Improvement

The SaaS spend management platforms enable users to access business data anywhere on any device. This technology allows users to pull up ad hoc reports or approve purchase orders while on the move, significantly increasing the system's flexibility.

Top Features of the Spend Management Software

While you may be shopping for the best spend management software right now, you should be looking for the features that an ideal program can provide. Another way to put it is that the essence of a spend management software is its features that solve your problems. Here are some of them -

1. Real-Time Expense Tracking

You can gain better insight into your data with a real-time expense tracking module. Automate receipts, invoices, and other expenses to reduce administrative time.

2. EnterSpend Analysis

With spend management solutions, you can review expenditures to identify cost-saving opportunities, improve strategic sourcing, and reduce procurement costs. In addition, data on procurement spending is consolidated in one place, eliminating the need for cumbersome spreadsheets and paper forms.

3. Managing Budgets & Forecasts

Cloud spend management platforms allow you to analyze financial data, calculate future organizational expenses, forecast revenues, and understand trends. As a result, you can allocate resources according to budgets and forecasts.

4. Procurement

You can automate routine processes, improve them iteratively, and manage and analyze data centralized to increase the speed and accuracy of your business processes, including spend control, fully automated processes for repetitive tasks, etc.

5. Control Maverick Spend

Business spend management software allows managers to maintain better control over budget spending by requiring prior approvals for specific transaction benchmarks.

Performing a thorough spend analysis can help you uncover gaps across all sources of spend data. Once you figure out who, what, and where to focus your efforts, you can create an action plan.

Benefits of Spend Management Software

Spend management solutions provide real-time visibility into company spending. Following are some of the key benefits of managing spend in an organization:

1. Transparency & Accountability in Spend:

Track and report spend data across the company, eliminating departmental silos. In addition, a centralized, unified budget management system improves visibility and accountability.

2. Streamline Time-consuming & Repetitive Tasks With Automation:

Better workflows and automation reduce errors in the procure-to-pay process and reduce data entry with automated purchase order creation, invoice processing, and approval workflows. Using workflows minimizes the chance of missed payments and other human error by limiting cycle times, eliminating duplicate costs, and eliminating exact purchase requests.

3. Enhance Risk Management & Reduce Unnecessary Expenditures:

Spend tracking and analysis tools remove unnecessary expenditures and simplify financial forecasting and reporting. Insights from spend data help internal benchmark performance, identify cost-saving opportunities, and leverage trends.

4. Improve Supplier Relations:

Understanding and improving suppliers' relationships can lower discounts and increase savings. In addition to spotting under-performing and non-compliant vendors, supplier management also protects against unnecessary expenses.

The Best Spend Management Software Companies in 2022

Implementing the right spend control software will ensure that you are not incurring unnecessary costs and protecting your business against shrinking margins.

1. TYASuite:

TYASuite Procurement software is one of the best spend management software that simplifies multi-layered approval processes, helps drive down costs, and improves cash flow.

Features - 

• Collaborative portal

• Access control for users

• No transaction limit

• Layer based approval

• Automated PO

Pricing -

• Startup Plan 1250 user/month

Up to 10 Users

• Startup Booster 1500 user/month

Up to 40 Users

• Startup Pro 1750 user/month

Up to 150 Users

• Enterprise Plan (On Request)

Unlimited Users

2. mjPRO:

The mjPRO SaaS platform digitizes the entire Procurement value chain from "planning a purchase" to "paying the supply partner." It ensures 100% spend visibility and leads to successful adoption by connecting all stakeholders to a single system.

Features - 

• Complete integrated PR-Payment module

• Leverage mjPRO Auction Engine

• AI & ML enabled auto RFQ

• Spend Analytics and Dashboards

• Excel Bidding

Pricing -

• Available on Request

3. Precoro:

Innovative open-source spend management software for small and mid-sized businesses that eliminates manual work improves visibility and allows them to control their purchases easily.

Features - 

• Inventory Management

• Warehouse Management

• Budget Management

• Billing & Invoicing

• Requisitions & Approvals

Pricing -

• Small (1-20 users)

$35 / month per user

• Large (21+ users)

Available on Request

4. Procurement Express:

The Procurement Express’s approval is instant. Remote team members can make purchase requests on the fly, even when they are out of coverage. In addition, managers can directly approve, reject, or comment on purchases from their email inboxes.

Features - 

• Accurate spending allocation

• Adaptable Approvals

• Customizability

• Insightful purchasing reports

• Better Budgeting

Pricing -

• Monthly

$31 per user/month

• Enterprise

Custom per user/year

5. Kissflow Procurement Cloud:

Kissflow Procurement Cloud gives businesses of any size a flexible procure-to-pay suite that streamlines their procurement processes from sourcing to dealing with invoices and suppliers.

Features - 

• e-Procurement, Assisted Buying

• AP Automation and Compliances

• Cloud Deployment

• Reports and Analytics

• Webhooks and API Support

Pricing -

• $ 1,990* /month (billed annually)

Latest Trends in Spend Management System

• Cloud-Based Spend Management Software Enables Remote & Flexible Work Practices

In the wake of the recent pandemic, distributed teams and remote workers have become more prevalent. A cloud spending management platform enables employees and stakeholders to access the system remotely, no matter where they are.

• Using Machine Learning to Improve Spend Management Processes

The use of machine learning algorithms automates data categorization, reducing the need for manual data entry and increasing visibility into the spend. 

The use of machine learning in budgeting and forecasting helps companies identify profitable opportunities and avoid hidden risks in their data. It can also find patterns in data, reduce forecast errors, and decrease financial risk.

It's important to know what you're looking for before choosing a business spend management solution. There's no better time than now to put business spend management software to use. It will save you time and effort, but you'll also have more control over overspending.