Replacing Excel isn’t just a software decision — it’s a shift in how finance teams operate. 

Spend management touches every corner of a company: employees requesting reimbursements, managers approving card expenses, finance tracking budgets, and admins dealing with vendors and invoices. 

While Excel has long been the glue holding these processes together, it comes with limitations — no real-time visibility, manual errors, version chaos, and zero controls.

Plenty of tools promise to replace Excel, but most fall short. 

One offers cards, another handles invoice payments, and yet another supports reimbursements. 

But what about petty cash tracking? Or setting budget rules specific to departments and enforcing them at the point of spend? 

These gaps force teams back to spreadsheets, defeating the purpose of moving away in the first place.

In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the top alternatives to Excel for spend management. We’ll look at what they truly offer, where they fall short, and how to evaluate them based on the workflows your team needs, so you’re not stuck toggling between platforms (and spreadsheets) ever again.

Top 5 Excel Alternatives for Spend Management

Finance teams turn to dedicated spend management tools for better visibility and structure. However, not all tools offer the same capabilities. 

Some focus on cards and reimbursements, while others handle invoice approvals or budgets. A few leave gaps that send teams back to Excel, especially for things like petty cash or enforcing budgets at a department level.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of leading spend management platforms:

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• Corporate cards: All tools provide corporate card options, with variations in how granularly spending controls can be applied and how quickly cards can be issued. Tools like Pluto and Spendesk offer detailed user-level controls to help manage spend efficiently.
• Petty cash: This remains a gap in many platforms. Only Pluto includes features for managing petty cash. It offers a digital register to track cash transactions systematically.
• PR and invoices: Most tools support invoice workflows, but Pluto simplifies it further via WhatsApp-based uploads. It offers options such as customizable approval paths and uploading receipts through messaging platforms, simplifying documentation.
• Budgeting: Budgeting capabilities vary, with most platforms supporting basic department budgets and spend limits. Pluto includes options for applying budget controls at both the department and individual card level, helping finance teams enforce spending policies in real time.
  
  

1. Pluto 

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Pluto is a spend management platform for enterprises that transforms your finance processes with automation to provide more visibility and control. It brings together the spenders, savers, and sourcers of your business to offer a complete revolution from a chaotic spend management system to a seamless collaborative workflow. It is the fastest way to manage your finances, including accounts payable and employee reimbursement. 

Key Features:

• Enables custom approval workflows that adapt to the company’s hierarchy for timely and accurate approvals
• Facilitates intricate multi-layer workflows to support complex purchase requests and purchase orders
• Provides unlimited corporate cards with budget controls to maintain expenses within company policies
• Offers zero-balance cards that get funded automatically once an expense is approved
• Applies card-specific policies to simplify reimbursements at the branch and subsidiary level
• Allows users to add comments and document conversations along with transaction details for a comprehensive audit trail
• Grants view-only access to external accountants for reviewing financial data without editing rights
• Automates receipt capture through OCR, with support for bulk uploads via WhatsApp and email
• Sends alerts in case of duplicate receipt uploads to reduce fraud and compliance risks
• Generates custom expense reports for a clearer view of business spending trends
• Integrates with platforms like NetSuite for advanced general ledger (GL) coding, tax tracking, and vendor syncing
• Secures document storage with 5-year audit logs and bank-grade encryption

Pricing:

 Request a custom quote

Pros:

• Enables petty cash management — branch & subsidiary-level spend tracking (not offered by other platforms)
• WhatsApp integration to make receipt upload easy
• Offers up to 2% cashback on all non-AED transactions 
• Independent PCI DSS Level 1 Certification

Cons:

• Slightly longer onboarding due to the corporate card offering 
• Integrates with all other major enterprise resource planning (ERPs) except Tally

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2. Spendesk 

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Spendesk combines approvals, corporate cards, expense reimbursements, and invoice management to automate the spend management process. Specifically designed for finance teams, it offers real-time expense tracking and offers custom workflows for complete control. By consolidating all payments, it provides a spend management solution that enhances financial transparency. 

Key Features:

• Has OCR technology to capture and extract key details from receipts 
• Provides expense claim history, available anytime, anywhere, for quick and accurate reporting
• Offers a mobile app for quick reimbursement requests by snapping a photo of receipts
• Spots errors and missing receipts with real-time expense monitoring
• Automates the categorization of expenses and VAT account
• Detects duplicate invoices and errors to support three-way matching
• Tracks all purchase orders and invoices with the ability to schedule payments

Pricing: 

Request the sales team for a custom quote. A free trial is available.

Pros:

• Single purchases are straightforward
• Easy to integrate with an SSO provider, making login easy and secure for users 
• Handy drag-and-drop receipt functionality

Cons:

• Virtual cards are glitchy, with merchants rejecting transactions that have already gone through
• Some basic features are not included in the basic option where they should have been (i.e., memorizing accounting patterns for vendors). 
• Corporate cards have defects (especially for travel expenses)

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3. Airbase

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Airbase simplifies expense reporting with AI and ML. It ensures quick, hassle-free, and smart corporate expense management. It is an automation solution for SMBs and large enterprises. It packages various modules, such as AP automation and corporate cards, to ease the spend management process for accounting teams and employees.

Key Features: 

• Offers OCR to populate details, including GL category, date, amount, and purpose
• Ensures compliance by sending reminders and, if needed, locking cards until policies are met
• Eliminates the need to chase employees for receipts with reminders to upload receipts
• Provides custom approval workflows and budget limits for physical cards
• Enables quick responses to potential fraudulent purchases with real-time alerts for suspicious activity
• Supports onboarding with a self-service vendor portal and custom questionnaires
• Facilitates payments and approvals, including multi-subsidiary support, international currency, and real-time GL sync
• Real-time audit trail with receipts, notes, and documentation for transparency.

Pricing: 

Request the sales team for a custom quote.

Pros:

• Intuitive and easy to use; no training or previous knowledge required
• Seamless approval workflows

Cons:

• Poor reporting capabilities
• The mobile app is slow and takes time to load pages 
• SSO-based login sometimes takes a few tries
• Not suitable for complex branch-level approvals and expenses

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4. Coupa

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Coupa is a cloud-based automation platform to manage business spending, ranging from procurement to expense management. It facilitates supply chain optimization by providing visibility and control. It streamlines expenses, reduces risk, and ensures compliance by automating reporting, simplifying reimbursements, and offering mobile tracking. 

Key Features:

• Offers virtual payment cards for pre-approved expenses, speeding up the reconciliation
• Eliminates manual data entry with OCR technology and integration with accounting software
• Provides expense reports with intelligent algorithms to prevent fraud and ensure compliance
• Enables visibility and control over travel expenses before they occur, ensuring budget control
• Simplifies procurement by offering a centralized area for comparing items from various suppliers and managing punchouts and hosted catalogs
• Provides real-time visibility into purchase orders, order lifecycle, and order line availability
• Automates expense tracking based on the user's location, including mileage and receipt capture

Pricing: 

Request the sales team for a custom quote.

Pros:

• Several categories and filters in the analytics section to streamline data
• Chat option enables approver and claimant to discuss issues with receipts
• Enables the setting up of customized approval chains and includes additional new approvers  

Cons:

• Lots of unnecessary notifications, making it difficult to select the ones that need action or comment
• Low receipt searchability, making retrieval time-consuming
• Inconsistent syncing of the remit-to address from NetSuite
• Complex to implement and not intuitive, forcing admins to spend more time resolving employees' queries
• Slow customer service

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5. BILL

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BILL simplifies expense tracking by providing real-time visibility and customization to manage expenses. It is a spend management solution for SMBs to control payables, receivables, and all corporate expenses. It allows businesses to combine a scattered spend management process into a single platform with seamless syncing. 

Key Features:

• Provides credit limits ranging from $500 to $5 million to control spending within constraints
• Makes it easier to monitor spending with real-time visibility into the business finances
• Speeds up the approval process with custom approval workflows for minimal friction
• Supports multiple payment options, including ACH, credit card, check, and international wire transfers
• Automates purchase order workflows with the ability to sync and automate two-way and three-way matching
• Streamlines expense reconciliation with the ability to do quick coding and sync with accounting systems
• Enables automated receipt matching, categorization, and expense reporting, reducing administrative workload
• Offers security features, including the ability to freeze and create corporate cards instantly
• Notifies administrators of each employee's transactions, ensuring timely oversight

Pricing: 

Bill provides a free trial and essentials pack starting at $45 for six standard user roles. Its team and corporate packs are for $55 and $79, respectively. Enterprises need to request a custom quote.

Pros: 

• One-click swift payments
• Minimum training required
• Easy-to-use mobile app

Cons: 

• Customer support is difficult to initiate, slow, and unresponsive
• Frequent changes in the interface create confusion for users

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How to Implement Spend Management Successfully

Moving off Excel is not just a software change — it’s a mindset shift. 

Excel is flexible, familiar, and free, which is exactly why teams hang on to it, even when it slows them down. Replacing it with a dedicated spend management tool sounds logical, but without careful execution, the rollout stalls or backfires.

Here are the challenges finance teams face during this transition and how Pluto is designed to help overcome each one.

1. Resistance to Change Across Teams

Employees are used to submitting expenses via Excel, email, or even paper. Managers approve via email. Finance teams reconcile manually. Any shift from this routine—even a helpful one—feels like a disruption.

Pluto mimics existing workflows but improves them. Employees upload receipts via WhatsApp. Approvers get alerts, and finance has everything logged automatically. 

The learning curve is minimal and adoption happens without friction.

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2. Outdated or Manual Approval Chains

Many companies rely on unstructured approvals — email threads, Slack pings, or verbal OKs. Excel can’t enforce rules, but teams still fear losing “flexibility” when switching to a platform.

Pluto offers custom, no-code approval workflows. Finance teams can recreate their existing chains with added structure, speed, and transparency. 

Whether it's multi-step approvals or department-level conditions, Pluto supports it without adding friction.

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3. Integration Gaps with ERPs and Accounting Tools

Many platforms claim to integrate, but in reality, data still needs to be exported, cleaned, or adjusted before uploading into ERPs like NetSuite or Tally. This breaks automation and adds manual work.

Pluto offers two-way sync with leading ERPs. 

GL codes, tax rates, and vendor records are all mapped directly. Transactions and invoices flow automatically, ensuring the books stay clean and up-to-date.

4. Loss of Real-Time Budget Visibility

Excel becomes the fallback for budget tracking, especially when tools don’t allow granular spend limits or team-level breakdowns. This leads to overspending or month-end surprises.

Pluto brings budgeting inside the system. You define team budgets, assign limits to cards, and even create rules at the card level. 

Finance gets real-time views, and teams know their available budgets before they spend, not after.

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The Spend Management Solution for Your Team

Pluto isn’t just another finance tool — it’s a complete, frictionless system designed to simplify spend management for everyone. 

For employees, Pluto removes the usual pain of reimbursements and expense tracking. Just snap a receipt and send it via WhatsApp, the system auto-captures the data. 

For managers, approvals are structured yet flexible, thanks to no-code workflows that reflect your team’s real-world hierarchy. 

And for finance teams, Pluto brings petty cash, corporate cards, reimbursements, and accounts payable into a single platform that syncs directly with ERPs and accounting tools. There’s no scattered data, no last-minute Excel fire drills, and no chasing people for receipts. 

With built-in budget controls and live visibility, Pluto ensures every transaction is compliant, accounted for, and easy to trace. It’s not just about automation; it’s about finally making spend management work the way your team actually operates.

Sign up for free today.