EXPENSE MANAGEMENT SOFTWAREAI-supported expense control, from creation to review
All your team's expenses approved, categorised, and reconciled in real time. One system, every card, every entity. Full visibility, total control, and a faster close with lower audit risk.
"The flexibility at Payhawk is great — you can set up workflows in a way that works for your business. At Essentia, we centralise AP and subscriptions, but we delegate employee expenses to the employee. And Payhawk lets us set that up in a way that best works for us."
Expenses don’t slow finance down. Waiting for them does.
The Financial Controller Agent cleans up spend at source, chasing receipts and closing data gaps before they reach your reporting cycle. The business can move faster. And you start month-end with accurate, trusted numbers.
Five use cases. One AI-powered, finance-owned flow
You don’t manage features. You manage spend. With Payhawk, one finance-owned system keeps everything connected and removes manual work with built-in AI controls and automation, letting you manage spend before it happens.
Capture card expenses and employee reimbursements faster with AI-assisted categorisation and auto receipt-chasing from the Financial Controller Agent across the platform and app. Run your routine expenses and reimbursements through Payhawk without finance intervention.
From marketing to sales, give your teams flexibility without sacrificing control. Approve spend before it happens with requests, budgets, and proactive card controls. Then route approvals by amount, supplier, category, or team structure with support from the bulk review assistant and out-of-office approvals, so nothing slips through.
Understand what a project really costs while it’s still running. Tie every expense back to the right project, event, or cost centre in real time. Track margins as they happen, not weeks after the work is done. Answer performance questions with confidence (not estimates).
Keep recurring spend visible and owned. Centralise subscriptions where control matters and delegate what doesn’t. Track renewals, usage, and trends across IT, services, and more without surprises. Reduce leakage, avoid duplication, and swerve cost creep without slowing teams down.
Control edge cases without adding friction. Define your spend policies (including clear rules for things like office purchases), and let the Financial Controller Agent flag anomalies and out-of-policy spend automatically. That way, you only step in when something genuinely needs review.
Don’t take our word for it
Finance leaders from over 32 countries run spend management on Payhawk.
"We've boosted employee productivity by over four times and expect even greater impact as our fleet grows! Payhawk's automation has significantly cut processing time and reduced the errors that came with manual expense handling."
Tsvetomir Uzunov
CFO at Discordia
"With Payhawk, we get real-time information on the business and can track our expenses and costs for each event. We use custom fields adding expenses in Payhawk (and synced to NetSuite) to report on margins by event at the end of each month."
Howard Thompson
Global Financial Controller
“Before Payhawk, our time was consumed with chasing expense data from employees. But now, we have more time to analyse spend, more transparency, tighter control over all the expenses, and much less paperwork.”
Gabriela Leovac
Accountant
Ready to see real-time expense control in action? Let’s talk.
Everything you need to turn expense management into a live control system
Delight employees with an intuitive and easy to use mobile app, helping them submit expenses on the go.
Let our in-house machine learning algorithm reads receipts and autopopulate expense fields for you.
Automatically capture VAT rates from each receipt, ensuring reliable and accurate tax claims across all entities.
Use the power for more or less granularity with abilities to merge expenses or split an expense into multiple expense or line items with ease.
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Ensure timely receipt submission with pop-up notifications, automating receipt chasing after every single transaction.
Get every last document in with recurring reminders sent to employees with missing receipts and unsubmitted expenses.
Define custom approval flows per expense type. Build rules and triggers based on team structure, amounts, categories, or any custom field.
Simplify per diem expense submissions for travelling employees, then reimburse them directly to their personal bank accounts.
Calculate mileage reimbursements on the spot. Define unlimited custom rates to fit any use case.
Submit, approve, review, pay - in bulk. Scale your expense management naturally with a system that supports quick processing actions.
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Select rules and conditions for expenses that would require attention and trigger warnings to prevent them from being reviewed in bulk.
Speed up approval and reviews with in-product communication. Tag users to get their attention and receive notifications for new activity.
Seamless integrations
Speed up your month-end close with a fully synchronised finance stack. Direct integrations with your ERP, accounting, and HR tools ensure every transaction is automatically coded, matched, and reconciled in real time, so your team spends less time on admin and more time on decisions that matter.
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Discover enterprise power, without enterprise complexity
Manage employee expenses alongside all other company spend. With Payhawk you get complete control over your policies, workflows, and payments in a single platform.
FAQs
Expense management software is a digital tool designed to streamline the process of tracking, submitting, and approving business-related expenses. It helps organisations manage employee spending, from travel expenses to office supplies, by automating tasks such as receipt submission, expense reporting, and reimbursement.
- Expense Submission: Employees can upload receipts and submit expense claims through the software, often using a mobile app. Some platforms even allow users to scan receipts, automatically extracting key details like date, amount, and merchant.
- Approval Workflow: Once submitted, the expense claim is routed to the appropriate manager or department for review and approval, ensuring compliance with company policies.
- Policy Enforcement: The software can be configured to flag expenses that violate company policies, such as exceeding spending limits or submitting claims for unauthorised purchases.
- Reimbursement: After approval, the software facilitates quick and accurate reimbursement, either through payroll integration or direct bank transfers.
- Reporting and Analytics: Managers can access real-time data and reports on spending trends, helping to improve budgeting and financial planning.
By automating these processes, expense management software reduces manual errors, speeds up reimbursement, and provides better visibility into company spending.
It all comes down to a few core benefits:
- Fewer mistakes: People make mistakes, but fine-tuned software is far less likely to. SmartScan, for example, eliminates the potential for human error when inputting information from receipts.
- Faster processing: Streamlined tools for creating, submitting, reviewing, and approving reports means those reports are taken care of in a snap.
- Increased productivity: The less time employees spend manually creating and examining expense reports, the more time they can spend doing, well, anything else.
- Reduced waste: Expense reporting mistakes cost money, both in unnecessary reimbursements and employee time. But when you leave the tedious calculations to expense management software, you can save that money for more important things.
- Real-time visibility: Finance teams can track spending as it happens, not just at month-end.
Spend management refers to the broader process of controlling and optimising a company's overall spending. This includes procurement, supplier management, contract management, and ensuring that spending aligns with company budgets and policies. It focuses on preventing unnecessary expenses before they occur and managing the entire lifecycle of spending.
Expense management, on the other hand, is more specific to tracking and processing employee-initiated expenses, such as travel, meals, or office supplies. It typically involves submitting, approving, and reimbursing employee expenses, and ensuring compliance with company policies after the spending has already happened.
In short, spend management is a more comprehensive, proactive approach to managing all company expenditures, while expense management deals specifically with tracking and reimbursing employee expenses.
Payhawk simplifies expense reporting and reimbursement processes by automating key tasks. Employees can easily capture receipts using their mobile devices, while the software automatically extracts relevant data, reducing manual entry. Expenses are categorised in real-time, and approval workflows are streamlined, ensuring faster processing. Additionally, Payhawk integrates with accounting systems, making reimbursements seamless and reducing administrative burden. This end-to-end automation not only improves accuracy but also saves time for both employees and finance teams.
You can track various types of expenses with Payhawk, including:
- Employee Expenses: Monitor individual spending across your team, including travel, meals, and office supplies.
- Subscription Payments: Keep tabs on recurring payments for software, memberships, and other services.
- Corporate Card Transactions: Track all purchases made using company-issued cards.
- Vendor Payments: Manage payments to suppliers, contractors, and other third parties.
- Reimbursements: Record and process out-of-pocket expenses submitted by employees.
- Travel Expenses: Track costs related to business trips, such as flights, hotels, and transportation.
Payhawk provides a comprehensive view of your business's spending, helping you manage and optimise your financial operations.
Payhawk helps ensure compliance with company expense policies by offering customisable spending controls, automated approval workflows, and real-time expense tracking. Administrators can set specific limits and rules for different teams or individuals, ensuring that all expenses align with the company's policies. Additionally, Payhawk integrates with accounting software to streamline reporting and auditing, making it easier to identify and address any non-compliant transactions.
Yes, Payhawk integrates with various accounting and ERP systems, streamlining financial workflows and improving efficiency. You can see the full list of integrations we support here.
