Soooo you’ve finally decided it’s time to set up an expense management solution. Now to choose which one 🤔
We’ve personally used Divvy (BILL Spend & Expense), Ramp, Brex, and Expensify and we’re excited to share my thoughts on all the options to help you make the decision on which may be best for your team. Lets go!
Best Expense Management Tools
- ✅ BILL Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy): Best For Small Businesses (Top Pick)
- ✅ Ramp: Best For Scaling Businesses
- ❌ Brex: For Venture Backed Start-Ups ONLY
- ❌ Expensify: The OG
- ❌ Mercury: Not an Expense Management Solution (Yet)
Tl;DR: Which is Better?
If you don’t want to spend a ton of time researching which solution is best for you, here is the quick lowdown on how to choose between our top two recommendations—BiLL Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy) and Ramp. It comes down to your business size, and the available funds in your bank account in order to get approved.
Eligibility Requirements
BILL Bank Minimum: $0
Ramp Bank Minimum: $75,000
Both BILL & Ramp are free to use and do not require personal guarantees.
BILL Spend & Expense
If you’re a smaller business that doesn’t have $75,000 your bank quite consistently, BILL is going to be your best choice. They don’t have bank minimum’s to get approved and their expense management platform is more-so built for smaller teams. Construction businesses, real estate teams, contractors, nonprofits, service based agencies, and even sole proprietors would be best suited for BILL.
When we first learned about expense management software, our business was mainly a service based integration business and we didn’t have $75k just sitting in our account to even consider Ramp.
We thought about gaming the system, perhaps letting some money sit in the bank account in order to get approved for an account, but ultimately we didn’t want the risk of Ramp revoking our access at any stage if that cash flow had gone done. With that, we don’t recommend you trying to gamify getting approval for Ramp either.
If you don’t have $75k more or less always in your account, you can truly skip the rest of this article and apply for BILL here.
Ramp
If you easily meet that $75k bank minimum, and you’re a growing business, then we recommend applying for Ramp. Ramp has built features taking into consideration larger teams.
For example, say two people at the company are paying for the same subscription, Ramp can flag that duplicate spending to the finance team.
Ramp’s Intelligence feature can also give you guidance on where you may be able to negotiate down vendor costs, as they have access to what other companies your size are paying for services and subscriptions.
Apply for Ramp (Free).
As our business grew and we hit the $75k bank minimum, we couldn’t help but apply for a Ramp account. We knew we’d love it, the UI/UX is beautiful, but the software migration costs from BILL to Ramp would be way too high for us to consider switching, especially since we’ve been happy with BILL (it does everything we’d expect an expense management solution to do). It’s been 5+ years of using Bill and we truly love it.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty, keep reading our BILL vs Ramp vs Brex vs Expensify comparison ⤵️
