Best Aspire alternative in 2024

While both Aspire and Volopay have the ability to help your organization set up custom budgets and assign different team members to them, Volopay has a slight edge that many companies find useful.

Our platform gives you the option to set up specific departmental budgets for each team. The reason this is useful is that certain companies classify their expenses based on how each department is spending rather than based on the custom budgets you can create. 

When you create a custom budget on Volopay, a user’s corporate card can switch between multiple different budgets to access and spend funds as per the expense. On the other hand, when you choose to use our department feature, a user can only spend money from the departmental budget they are a part of.

This helps accounting teams in organizations to better account for how money is spent on a team and individual level.

A major part of the expense management ecosystem that SaaS products like Volopay and Aspire offer are the physical corporate cards. The way this works is that you can issue one physical corporate card for any and every employee of your company after adding them to the platform.

Once you do this, you will be able to monitor their spending in real-time through our dashboard. This solves the issue of not having visibility over how employees spend company budgets. But what about avoiding unaccounted expenses? How do you give your employees the freedom to make purchase decisions while still controlling the flow of money? 

This is where specific card controls come into play that is offered by Volopay. Using our platform you can tweak the spending permissions of each employee’s card with the regard to the following:

- Online transactions

- In-store purchases

- International ATM withdrawals

- Cross border transactions

So you can basically enable or disable the above options for each user depending on their spending requirements and maintain control over budgets.

A great feature from Volopay to its customers in Singapore. You can allow an employee to use their Volopay card and withdraw cash from an ATM internationally.

Having the ability to do so is very useful as it is common for traveling staff and business executives to have cash on them for city commute and other expenses where cards might not be accepted. 

One way to control your budget spending is by using the physical and virtual card controls that we provide mentioned earlier. But it’s not possible for a financial controller or any finance team member to be sitting and approving card expenses in real-time because that would defeat the whole point of giving your employees the flexibility to make spending decisions.

Instead, the control system works at a tighter level where a finance team member, manager, or team lead has to approve the funding of an employee’s card. When this request is sent, the employee can attach notes and inform the approver of the reason for requesting a certain amount to their card. This will keep things transparent between all stakeholders.

Now the cool part where Volopay stands apart is the option it gives you to set multi-level approval policies. To put it simply, this means that you can create an approval policy with multiple approvers for fund requests based on the amount that is being requested.

When dealing with vendors, there might be many cases when a supplier provides you a fixed amount of goods and services for which they charge you the same amount every month. So sending money to such vendors by creating a new payment every month can be a time-consuming task for the finance team.

To make things easy, Volopay allows you to create recurring payments to your vendors. You can easily set a custom date on which the payment should go out and also choose the frequency of how many times this should happen, for example, once on the first of every month for 6 months. 

Managing expenses is all about knowing the intricate details of how your company spends its budget so that adjustments can be made to make budget utilization more efficient.

Our platform not only helps you carry out seamless payments but also helps you measure them. You can find an easy to understand spend analytics dashboard that helps you see:

- Spends made by each department

- Spends made through cards/bill pay

- Spends made over a certain time period(day, week, month, year, etc.)

- Spends based on vendors

- Spends based on employees

Both Volopay and Aspire have the capability to integrate with some of the most well know accounting software tools like Xero, Quickbooks, Netsuite, etc. But what makes life extremely easy for accounting teams and why they choose Volopay is due to our two-way sync feature. 

This two-way sync helps our platform source invoices and helps a business not miss out on payments because it was not manually uploaded onto our platform. Volopay also pulls vendor data from your software and adds it to the system for even faster payments. 

Once expenses are made, verified, and classified with the necessary accounting fields, they are automatically synced to your accounting software; this two-way sync happens on a periodic basis and helps the finance and accounting team maintain accurate ledgers and stay on the same page at all times.

It might happen that your business uses accounting software that does not have a native integration with Volopay’s platform. In such cases, we support businesses by letting them provide us with a custom CSV format for their accounting reports so that we can custom code our tool to generate expense reports according to this format.

Once done, every time you download an expense report from Volopay in the form of a CSV it will be formatted according to your accounting tool so that you can directly upload this file without having to manually enter all the expense data from Volopay into your accounting tool.