Top 10 financial management tools and software for your business

A versatile slate of financial management tools can help companies control spend and boost profits. In fact, businesses that invest in the right tech stack experience nearly three times a higher customer retention rate. 

If you want to free up hours often spent manually processing invoices, matching receipts to expense reports, and reconciling charges—all while clarifying your company's financial picture and more efficiently allocating capital—this guide has you covered. 

What are financial management tools?

For businesses, financial management tools typically refer to the bevy of software platforms and processes teams use to control company spend, track profits, budget, bookkeep, prepare for internal or external audits, and monitor relationships with vendors. 

Solutions under this broad scope of tools can help companies organize, track, and report on every financial transaction the business makes—all in an effort to make smarter spend decisions now and support growth later. 

Some financial management tools help businesses monitor employee spend—by streamlining the expense reimbursement process, issuing corporate cards to eligible employees, or enforcing internal policies, for instance. Other tools can help with accounting—like syncing financial transactions to your general ledger, reporting, headcount planning, vendor bill pay, and tax preparation. There’s also the rare system that handles multiple finance functions simultaneously—giving teams a consolidated view of spend data across their workforce. 

5 benefits of financial management tools

Standout financial management systems help employees, admins, and executives save time and make better business decisions. Here’s a glance at some of the biggest perks:

• Save time on manual work: 44% of finance leaders say their teams spend more than half their time on admin tasks. Financial management tools can automate manual processes, making it easier to tie the books out and keep costs in check. 
• Improve visibility: Financial tools can track cash flow and see how different buckets of spend—from payroll to bill payments, expense reimbursements, and headcount planning—interrelate
• Better compliance: These tools also help teams prepare tax documents ahead of audits, adhere to bookkeeping principles, and enforce employee spend policies.
• Accurate budgeting and forecasting: Finance solutions can track monthly spend, determine metrics like the average cost per new hire, and report on other costs to stick to predetermined budgets and forecast your company’s future needs.   
• Boost employee morale: Companies stand out when they can swiftly reimburse employees who make business purchases with personal funds and empower team members to spend responsibly. Financial management tools ease administrative burdens and reduce laggard approval processes. 

Top 10 financial management tools

Here’s a closer look at some of the best financial management tools available for businesses. 

1. Rippling

Rippling is an all-in-one platform that unifies HR, IT, and finance into a single system, paving the way for time-saving automations that help businesses manage their workforce. 

Rippling consolidates all of your company’s finances—from payroll and benefits to corporate cards and expense management–giving you an up-to-date view of cash flow across your company and offering unprecedented control over spending patterns. 

While many spend systems only allow for basic employee-manager approval chains, with Rippling’s advanced policy engine, you can set hyper-custom policies based on the vendor, dollar amount, and expense category, helping you block out-of-policy expenses with ease. You can also tee up automated workflows that help you control spend, like triggering an alert when a department’s expenses sharply increase. 

Standout features: 

• Create granular, role-based spending policies and approval chains
• Automate otherwise tedious expense management tasks like flagging duplicate or mismatched receipts and syncing transactions to your general ledger
• Issue, manage, and revoke corporate cards with customizable spend controls based on employee spending needs
• Automatically convert expenses into local currencies, simplifying international expense reimbursements
• Comprehensive analytics and reporting, providing real-time visibility into workforce data and spending trends (with role-based permissions dictating who can see what)

2. Expensify

Expensify is a user-friendly financial management software built to streamline the expense tracking and reimbursement process. With features like receipt scanning, corporate card reconciliation, and customizable approval workflows, Expensify simplifies expense management for both employees and administrators.

Standout features: 

• Automatically scan receipts, minimizing manual data entry
• A corporate card with up to 2% cash back on purchases depending on spend, making it an attractive option for businesses
• Integrations with popular accounting, HR, and travel apps
• Global reimbursement features for cross-border payments in international currencies
• Invoicing software that automatically calculates taxes, discounts, and fees

3. Ramp

Ramp is a spend management software platform that helps companies issue corporate cards, automate accounting workflows, and pay vendors. Businesses can also use Ramp to manage employee spend policies and reconcile expenses. 

Standout features: 

• Unlimited virtual and physical corporate cards with spend controls and auto-enforced policies
• Automated expense management with receipt matching, generation, and compliance checks
• Automated invoice processing, approval workflows, and vendor payments
• AI-powered savings insights to identify cost-saving opportunities

4. Brex

Brex helps companies streamline their business spending with customizable expense policies, automated receipt capture, and accounting integrations. The AI-powered spend platform also offers corporate credit cards, travel booking shortcuts, and invoice scanning for vendor bills. 

Standout features:  

• Physical and virtual credit cards with up to 7x back on certain spending
• Customizable spend policies with AI-assisted expense reviews 
• A travel and expense (T&E) management solution to help with booking and budgeting
• A business account with a 4.89% yield that can pair with corporate credit cards 

5. SAP Concur

Concur's cloud-based expense management platform helps businesses control costs and monitor compliance. Concur has integrations across travel, invoice, and expense. It also syncs with accounting software like QuickBooks, NetSuite, and SAP’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. 

Standout features:  

• Automated expense capture with corporate cards, travel bookings, and receipts
• Accounts payable automations that reduce noncompliant spend and boost productivity
• Robust analytics and reporting capabilities for real-time visibility into spending trends
• Extensive integrations with other systems

6. Navan

Navan is a travel and expense management solution. It offers automated expense categorization, adjustable spend controls, and global reimbursements across 45 countries and 25 currencies.

Standout features: 

• Automated reconciliation that reduces manual data entry
• Companies can set customizable spend controls enforced at purchase, reducing out-of-policy spend and fraud
• Analytics that help businesses flag out-of-policy spend and improve forecasting
• Navan provides travel booking, exclusive deals, 24/7 support, and an easy platform for business travel management

7. Xero

Xero is an accounting software provider that helps businesses save time recordkeeping, reconciling transactions, and processing invoices. The solution, which specializes in working with small businesses, can access bank data from more than 21,000 global financial institutions, integrate with other business apps, and also help with budgeting. 

Standout features: 

• Automated invoice reminders customizable payment solutions
• Inventory management workflows that reduce manual tracking and assess performance
• Daily reconciliation to confirm transactions and help keep bookkeeping accurate
• Job tracking tools that help with project planning, budgeting, quoting, and invoicing

8. QuickBooks

QuickBooks is a software provider with a suite of financial management products across accounting, payroll, and time tracking. Small and mid-sized businesses can use QuickBooks for invoicing, tracking expenses, managing bills, tax preparation, reporting, and more. 

Standout features:

• Smart invoicing software that helps quicken vendor payments
• Expense management features that sync with every account, upload receipts, auto-categorize transactions and account for deductions
• On-demand experts who can help businesses with tax filings for certain plans
• Business reporting features helping teams view income statements and balance sheets 

9. FreshBooks

FreshBooks also offers accounting software to small and medium-sized businesses. It offers quick invoicing features, vendor bill pay, expense tracking, and double-entry bookkeeping tools that help finance teams tie their books out. 

Standout features:  

• Quick and customizable invoice generation
• Expense management features like mobile receipt scanning, tax document preparation, and budgeting tools
• Proposal templates that help businesses explain a project’s scope, timeline, and deliverables to prospective clients
• Accounting tools that allow businesses to easily track loans, assets, income and map transactions to the right expense categories

10. NetSuite

Oracle NetSuite is a cloud-based ERP that has helped more than 38,000 companies simplify accounting processes, streamline inventory tracking, and more efficiently allocate resources. Financial management products include expense tracking, bookkeeping, and reporting. NetSuite also has products that manage customer service and HR. 

Standout features:  

• Financial reporting, budgeting software, and forecasting tools that help businesses generate financial statements compliant with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). 
• Invoicing tools that support different pricing models and help manage recurring subscriptions
• General ledger account reconciliation, credit card matching, and invoice to purchase order matching
• Expense management capabilities that help employees submit receipts and route them for approval

Choosing the best financial management tools

There are plenty of options for financial management software solutions. Here’s what to keep in mind when weighing which tools belong in your tech stack. 

Scalability for future growth

Think about your workforce needs now and your future business growth as you scale. If you envision expanding your global footprint and hiring or working with vendors in international markets, some solutions let you automatically pay in local currency—so you don’t have to worry about conversions. 

Also, while manual budgeting and headcount planning processes within spreadsheets may suffice for fledgling small businesses or startups, you’ll likely benefit from software more advanced workflows and automation capabilities as you grow and your financial picture becomes more complex. 

Security for sensitive financial data

Nearly four in 10 finance leaders list cybersecurity threats as a primary challenge with financial management technology. Look for financial management solutions that protect sensitive workforce data with enterprise-grade security and regular audits. 

Also keep in mind that while finance leaders and C-suite executives need visibility over an entire organization’s spend, individual department heads and employees likely need more limited access. With this in mind, seek platforms that let you assign granular role-based permissions—so that the right people have access to the right information.  

Integrations with other systems in your tech stack

While some SaaS tools may perform a couple finance functions well, standout solutions work in sync with other systems in your tech stack. In your search for platforms best fit for your financial management needs, take stock of options with a breadth of integration capabilities with third party apps that let you, for instance, sync expense reimbursements to your accounting software, or conduct financial planning and analysis (FP&A) of your vendor relationships.

Reporting capabilities

Look for solutions that give you real-time access to customizable reports that can slice spend data across departments, offices, and expense categories. This helps your business control costs, view the total cost of hiring new employees (factoring in salary alongside equity compensation) across departments, forecast future headcount needs, and create budgets. 

Consolidated systems

Four in 10 finance leaders say that a lack of interoperability between existing systems is a primary challenge in adopting and integrating new financial technologies.

Why? When your financial picture is scattered across dozens of unintegrated systems, teams struggle tracking down the right approvers for expenses, coordinating across departments to ensure headcount is within budget, and assessing total cash burn across every different spend bucket. And when finance and HR processes are siloed, teams play catch-up seeing how workforce changes—like hires, departures, and org chart reshufflings—impact costs. They also toil through constant manual data entry to reconcile disparate platforms. Look for solutions that bring multiple financial management functions under the same roof. 

Rippling: All financial management tools in one place

While there are plenty of reliable spend solutions, they’re often siloed from the rest of a company’s workforce management processes. Then there’s Rippling, which gathers all of your company spend—expense reimbursements alongside vendor bills, payroll, and corporate cards—under the same roof, giving companies unprecedented control over every finance stream. With Rippling Spend, you can create customizable reports, approval chains, and policy enforcements—all in an intuitive platform.

And since Rippling uses employee data to connect finance with the rest of your workforce management processes—across HR and IT—company spend policies will automatically apply to new employees as soon as they onboard and automatically adjust if they ever change roles. Rippling can also automatically assign and send a corporate card and pre-configured laptop to new employees once they sign an offer letter. And if an employee leaves or gets terminated, Rippling can automatically lock both their card and device. 

In addition to more automations, Rippling’s unified hub of employee data gives companies vast control over their spend. Why? You can customize hyper-granular policies based on an employee’s role, department, and other attributes and authorize purchases based on vendor, type of transaction, and amount. 

Frequently asked questions

What is digital financial management?

Digital financial management is the process of using electronic systems—like cloud-based software—to assist with a company’s finance operations. Digital financial management tools can automate tasks across invoicing and bill pay, bookkeeping, tracking expense reimbursements, monitoring corporate card use, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), and more. The solutions are designed to offload manual work to save finance teams time and reduce errors. 

Do I need accounting knowledge to use financial management tools?

It depends on the platform and its capabilities. While many financial management tools don’t require expert accounting knowledge, the finance team members using them often need to understand basic accounting, budgeting, and forecasting principles. Employees who are not finance team members don’t need accounting knowledge to, say, file a receipt through an expense management platform. 

What is the most important tool for managing finances?

Companies often employ multiple tools to manage their finances. While there’s no imperative to use a single tool, businesses should always have an accounting system in place, a process for expense reimbursements, budgeting workflows, vendor bill pay protocols, and financial planning and reporting capabilities.

Disclaimer: Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.