Managing expenses often seems like a chore to most business owners — it’s time-consuming and downright exhausting. But its importance cannot be overestimated, as the survival of your business depends on it.
Luckily, reporting expenses doesn’t have to be a hassle these days. Expense management platforms have become a staple of most growing businesses, as it allows them to keep abreast of their spending.
In this guide, we’ll look at two of the best expense management systems in the market today: Penny Inc and Pex.
We’ll look at their benefits, features, and pricing, so you can make a more informed decision when looking for a platform.
Penny Inc
Having a wide array of features and automation capabilities, Penny is easily one of the best expense apps that you can use for your small business. It offers a reloadable debit Mastercard that’s integrated with an expense reporting platform.
With Penny, you can issue debit cards to your employees, which can help you avoid expense reimbursements, petty cash problems, and confusion from shared credit cards.
Penny displays all your spending in one place, eliminating the hassle of having to track your spend across multiple channels. Its easy-to-use dashboard allows for instant data review.
It increases transaction visibility for finance teams, budget owners, and spenders. With real-time insight into employee spend, you won’t have to worry about employees going over budget.
As a business owner, you get to enjoy the flexibility that the platform provides; you can approve fund requests from anywhere you are. You can set spending limits, control costs, and enforce rules from the same platform. These features reduce the potential for fraud — one of the main problems plaguing small businesses.
Penny also allows you to sign up for unlimited virtual cards. WIth a virtual corporate card, you can easily monitor all of your company’s subscriptions, automate reconciliations, and reduce the risk of being overcharged by vendors.
In fact, what sets Penny Inc apart from other expense management systems is that it’s completely free. This means you won’t pay any setup fees, hidden fees, or monthly charges.
Penny integrates with most of the popular cloud accounting platforms. This means that every transaction you make — on either Penny Mastercard or the virtual corporate card — automatically transfers to QuickBooks. With this feature, you can automate manual accounting work, reconcile transactions in real-time, and save time thanks to automatic categorization.
The platform’s receipt matching feature is also impressive. The app can send reminders to your employees to photograph their receipts after making a purchase.
When it captures the receipt, it instantly attaches a copy of it to your employee’s transaction. So, you won’t have to chase receipts anymore or sift through a pile of them when closing your books every month.
What is Penny Inc’s ideal audience?
Penny is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses. Scriptors, nonprofits, and restaurant delivery services, particularly, will find the expense management software very helpful.
What’s the pricing?
As mentioned earlier, the service is completely free. You don’t have to pay any fees when setting up or any monthly charges when using the platform (and no hidden charges, either).
What are the main features?
Some of the key features you’ll find with Penny include:
- Receipt management
- Automatic reconciliation
- Receipt matching
- Expense Control
- Approval Process Control
- Real-time visibility
PEX
Pex, which comes second on our list, is a cutting-edge software that helps businesses manage their day-to-day spending. Using the solution, business owners can empower their workers to spend responsibly.
Similar to Penny, Pex offers a plastic card, virtual cards, and a dynamic interface to track your organization’s spend. The interface neatly displays spending limits for each department, individual cardholders, vendor category, among other things.
You can set the platform to instantly approve or deny any expenses. You can monitor purchases from anywhere, at any time. But what really makes Pex a worthy investment is that it can easily fit your business’ needs as it grows.
It offers a scalable solution and can process up to millions of transactions each day. So, as you hire more employees, your purchases skyrocket, and your revenue increases, you can continue using Pex to streamline your expense process.
The app integrates with a boatload of business applications, which include:
- Expensify
- Xpenditure
- Tallie
- Nexonia
- Xero
- Quickbooks
- eCapital
It captures digital receipts just as well as Penny Inc. So, you can rest assured that lost receipts will no longer be a problem for your organization.
What is Pex’s ideal audience?
Any company — either with an army of one or an army of hundreds of employees — can use the service to control their spending. It’s best suited to businesses that are evolving, as it’s scalable and can be useful to even giant enterprises.
What’s the pricing?
Pex offers a 2-month free trial. You’ll, however, need to pay some fees to continue with the service after the trial ends. Price varies according to the number of cards you want to issue to your employees. Here are the details:
- A one-time setup fee of $49.95
- $8 monthly charge for each card you’re issued with
- If you make transactions worth over $50,000 in a month, Pex won’t charge you a fee
- There are no charges for replacing cards
- Fund transfers are free
- No domestic transaction fees
What are the main features?
Some of the key features of the Pex platform include:
- Credit tracking
- No minimum funding amount per card
- Allows for transfers from bank accounts to Pex accounts
- Merchant allocation
- Credit tracking
- Analytics
- Dynamic dashboard
Final Thoughts
The features, ease-of-use, and pricing make Penny Inc an ideal choice for just about any business. Offered free, the platform has a huge advantage over other expense management apps in the market. With Penny Inc, you’re literally getting more bang for your buck.
