Best Spenmo alternative in 2024

Planning and distributing budgets is a major exercise within the scope of expense management. But the tougher and most often crucial aspect of company budgets is the way employees utilize money and what systems are put in place to control the flow of funds.

While Volopay and Spenmo both give you the ability to create custom budgets, Volopay has another option where it allows you to create a fixed number of budgets based on the departments you have. This helps in keeping the expenses of a particular department linked only to their departmental budget rather than multiple different budgets.

Volopay has this feature because we have recognized that different companies measure and classify their budget utilization in different ways. Hence when you choose Volopay, you have the flexibility to either opt for completely custom budgets that you name based on requirements that come and go, or you can keep fixed departmental budgets where the structure is a bit more rigid helping finance teams and accounting teams analyze expenses in a simpler way.

The Volopay physical cards provided and any virtual cards that you issue to your employees when you onboard them on the platform can easily be saved on Google Pay and used for contactless payments.

This is a really useful feature as Google Pay is a commonly accepted payment method and makes it easier to stay safe from contact-based risks that have increased during and after the pandemic.

Physical cards are needed mostly by the employees of a company who tend to travel a lot. This can include sales staff who need to meet clients or business executives for conferences, seminars, etc. Whatever the case may be, there will be instances where you would need cash because a card payment might not be accepted.

Keeping this in mind Volopay gives you the option to enable or disable international cash withdrawals for an employee’s physical Volopay card through our dashboard. 

While it is not possible to control every transaction being made by an employee through their cards, it is possible to restrict certain types of transactions. Every business that accepts payment via a card has what is called a merchant category code(MCC), a 4-digit number. An MCC is used to classify a business by the types of goods or services it provides.

What Volopay allows you to do is block transactions to certain businesses or categories of businesses from occurring whenever a payment is initiated. This stops an employee from spending company budgets on expenses that are not allowed as per the policies of your organization.

Making vendor payments is a crucial part of the accounts payable team for any growing business. And as you keep growing, the number of vendors and suppliers you deal with also keeps increasing. This can make creating and initiating payments every month a time-consuming process. 

To make things more streamlined, Volopay helps you create a database of vendors, add all their important payment information within our platform, save time, and manage all vendors in one place. Depending on your financial relationship with vendors, you get the functionality to schedule and make recurring payments so that your team doesn’t waste time on repetitive tasks each month.

As a business in Singapore, the chances of dealing with vendors and businesses abroad are quite high. Unfortunately, if you choose to use Spenmo, you will incur conversion charges on every transfer you make outside Singapore. 

On the other hand, when you use Volopay, you get the option to create unique multi-currency wallets that each hold a particular currency. So let’s say you are holding US dollars in a wallet on our platform; when you use this money to send funds to the US, you will not incur any FX fees helping you save a lot of money that is spent on conversion charges.

Our platform supports all the major global currencies with a total of 130+ currencies in over 100 countries. This gives businesses the flexibility to carry out international payments without the drawbacks of traditional wire transfers.

A submission policy is basically a set of rules and regulations regarding the submission of information for an expense. So for example, whenever an employee makes an expense through a card, you can make it mandatory for them to submit details about it such as putting a note as to why that expense was made and also attach a receipt of this expense.

When using Spenmo, the platform gives you very basic functionality to set up a submission policy. On the other hand, if you choose Volopay, you can set up custom submission policies for each budget that you create. This gives you the flexibility to place control measures only wherever it is necessary. 

Volopay provides you with a comprehensive dashboard that includes spending analytics. Using this feature you can track how each employee has been spending their allocated budgets. You can see spending based on the time period, see which vendor is being spent on the most, and also analyze whether most payments are being made through cards or bill pay. 

All this data can give your finance and accounting team insights regarding budget utilization and the tweaks they need to make in order for effective budgeting.

Another edge Volopay has over Spenmo is the ability to adjust the automated syncing between our platform and the accounting software tool that you use. The data on Spenmo is synced once every midnight, whereas if you use Volopay, you get the option to choose how frequently should our software pull the data from your accounting tool.

This helps your finance and accounting team always stay in sync much better without any delay or lag in the uniformity of ledgers maintained by both teams.

While Volopay supports integrations with many accounting software tools present in the market across the world, if there is a situation where your business uses a tool that is not natively supported by our platform, you need not worry about your accounting team having to manually enter expense data from Volopay to their ledgers.

This is thanks to our ability to integrate a universal CSV. What this means is that you can provide a pre-formatted CSV spreadsheet with us that is based on your accounting tool. Once we have this, we will be able to integrate this format into the export capabilities of your Volopay account. 

So now, every time you want to sync your expense ledger on Volopay with your accounting tool, all you have to do is download the reports in the CSV format you provided and upload them directly to your accounting software.

Another great benefit of using Volopay that Spenmo does not have yet is our feature called triggers. Each and every expense has certain accounting fields that need to be filled before syncing it to your accounting software. But it can be very time-consuming to fill out these fields manually for each expense. So, Volopay lets you set a trigger, based on the type of expense it is. 

For example, you can set accounting field values for expenses being made through a certain card, a particular department/budget, or for a particular vendor. Once you do this and confirm a trigger, each time an expense is made through a card that has a trigger set, the accounting fields will be automatically filled. 

This will ultimately make it easier for the finance team to carry forward reviewed and verified transactions to sync easily.