If you’re comparing spend management systems like Payhawk, Spendesk, Soldo and Jeeves, you’re probably looking for a tool to help you:
Payhawk, Spendesk, Soldo and Jeeves all give you control over your spending and full visibility in real-time of your transactions. In this article, we’ll compare:
Note: Need a spend management system that also comes with a credit card? Try Jeeves.
Here are the most important features when comparing Payhawk vs Spendesk vs Soldo vs Jeeves:
* Minimum spending requirement: 8k (USD) for clients in Canada, the U.S. and Brazil, 8k (GBP) for clients in the U.K., and 8k (EUR) for clients in Europe. Maximum monthly cashback capped at 5k (USD) for the U.S. and Brazil, 5k (GBP) for the U.K., and 5k (EUR) for Europe.
There are some important differences between the four spend management systems in this article.
Jeeves’ spend management system includes a business credit card specifically designed to provide companies with cash to fund their growth.
Payhawk, Spendesk and Soldo’s spend management platforms use debit and prepaid cards. Unlike Jeeves, there is no new money. Instead, you have to transfer money from your business bank account onto the cards to use them.
Jeeves is an all-in-one spend management system and credit card for businesses. Over 3,000 companies now use Jeeves in 20+ countries.
We designed our expense management software to be easy to use and quick to set up.
From the main dashboard – accessible via the desktop and app – you’ll have immediate visibility on company expenditure and spending categorisation to better track and manage your cash flow.
Log in and you’ll see straight away in real-time:
We make it easy to find what you need quickly and get a 360-degree view of your company spending. With a click, you can:
We’re always here to help you get the most out of your Jeeves card. If you need assistance, you can phone or email your account manager or use the live webchat function on the dashboard.
Jeeves offers free physical and virtual company cards.
Unlike our other spend management platforms, we don’t charge you per card or cap the number of times you can use a card per month. Nor do we have maximum individual transaction values, so you can take advantage of last-minute opportunities without worrying about card restrictions.
Issue, freeze, and delete cards with a click via the Jeeves dashboard, all at no cost. If you suspect fraud on one card, just freeze it while you investigate and unfreeze it just as easily.
Give Jeeves business credit cards to all your employees to do away with expense reimbursements and expense reports and make managing and tracking employee spending easier.
You can set, raise or lower the spending limit on individual virtual and physical cards whenever you want.
Employees can take a photo of a business expense receipt through the Jeeves App and add receipts to their expense transactions with a click to save them and your finance team time.
You can also create virtual business credit cards to manage company expenditures easily. For example, you can create a separate virtual card for each supplier and subscription service for instant control over your expenses. You can even create unique cards for one-off purchases.
Not only that, because these are credit cards and not debit cards, you won’t have to keep topping up 5+ cards every month for your employees' spending or recurring expenses. Instead, just pay off your credit balance at the end of the month and your credit will automatically reset.
Coming soon: automated expense approvals, allowlists, and blocklists.
Many spend management systems charge up to 3% for overseas transactions in a different currency. Many credit, debit, and prepaid card providers do the same.
With Jeeves, you can make cross-border payments without paying any transaction fees. Whether you’re paying overseas suppliers or international collaborators, you won’t have to deal with high mark-ups and cross-border payment fees.
Spend £1,000,000 a month on overseas suppliers? Pay by Jeeves and, with fee-free forex, you’ll save £360,000.
You can also use Jeeves' fee-free cards for your travel expense management.
Almost every other expense management platform requires you to transfer your own funds to use corporate cards.
As founders ourselves, we know the importance of credit to grow businesses, especially those scaling quickly. So we created the only expense management solution with a business credit card designed for growth.
Credit cards also offer better rewards and make managing your cash flow and employee expenses easier.
You may also like: Why Should Businesses Use Credit Cards?
Instead of paying via bank transfer, pay by Jeeves and get money back.
We offer some of the best cash back for business credit cards. Increase your profit margins with Jeeves' cashback. You’ll receive up to 3% cashback in the first 90 days and then 1.5% thereafter if you're based in the U.S. or Brazil or 1% thereafter if you're based in the U.K., Europe or Canada. You can receive up to 5k of cashback every month every time you spend a minimum of 8k monthly.
Imagine your company spends £1,000,000 a month. With Jeeves, you would get £60,000 yearly in cashback. When you add your £360,000 in forex fees savings, you could save as much as £420,000 per year.
You also get access to our reward program, offering savings of up to $100,000 a year on popular service providers like AWS, HubSpot and Notion.
Every cardholder in your company also benefits from free access to 1,300+ airport lounges globally.
You can reduce your spending with Jeeves because we’re cost-free. Pay no annual account charge or charges of any kind. Create an unlimited number of physical or virtual cards, all for free.
We don’t charge you for the number of users, either. You can create 10, 100 or 1000 cards for your employees and external collaborators. Each person can access their card with a unique login, set up 2-factor authentication for extra security, and see their transaction and spending limits, all for free from both the Jeeves App and desktop.
Other spend management platforms require a minimum monthly spend to provide you with a personal account manager. Instead, account management is entirely free with Jeeves.
Jeeves doesn’t offer OCR scanning on receipts snapped by employees using the mobile app just yet.
OCR scanning is a way of automatically extracting written information from receipts. This saves finance teams time by not having to type the receipt’s information into Xero or QuickBooks.
We don’t yet offer an API stack for clients. With an API, you might be able to integrate Jeeves into another platform such as Whatsapp.
Jeeves is good for high-growth, investor-backed scale-ups and businesses with 2 years of trading that need funding for growth and the visibility to tightly control expenditure thanks to our easy-to-use spend management system.
We understand Jeeves may not be right for every company. By way of comparison, here’s a summary of spend management platforms Payhawk, Spendesk and Soldo.
Payhawk’s spend management system gives you oversight of and control over your cash, expenses and payments linked to a business debit card account. 1,500 companies use Payhawk worldwide.
With Payhawk, you’ll need to upload either GBP or EUR into your account to cover the expected spend during the month. If you don’t transfer enough, you may have to top up your company wallet.
You’ll get instant access to a general overview of your expenses when you log in. You’ll be able to search for specific transactions, like finding invoices where you need to chase up receipts with employees.
Employees can request funds for specific transactions via the app, which you can then approve or deny. This feature helps you avoid employees spending money on goods or services you don’t want or with suppliers not on your procurement list.
Other features include automatic notices asking you whether a recurring payment to the same supplier (even if for different amounts) is a subscription.
Issue and withdraw cards from the dashboard. For each employee card you issue, you can decide:
You can group employee cards to keep an eye on a team or department’s overall expenditure.
You may have to wait up to 10 working days to receive a physical card.
Payhawk’s API stack is suitable for companies wanting deep integration with their ERP software.
The API allows you to export data, see expenses in real-time, monitor transactions and more. You need to subscribe to the 20+ seat service for API access and access to integrations for Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle NetSuite and Exact.
However, Xero, QuickBooks, Datev and Sage integration is available on all tariffs.
Payhawk provides support by phone, email and webchat in six countries. There’s a customer area on its website offering security information, usage advice, and a FAQ centre.
For 24/7 support and one-to-one account management, you must be on one of their bespoke tariffs designed for larger businesses.
Like Jeeves, Payhawk offers cashback on card usage. But it’s only available to customers on annual plans and stops at the level of your base monthly fee (a few hundred pounds a month at most).
Payhawk offers two standard tariffs. The €149 per month comes with basic features and €299 per month provides much greater functionality. On both tariffs, additional cards cost €9 per month each.
Other charges include:
Payhawk’s starter Premium cards for €149 per month plus €9 per card per month are a good fit for small businesses wanting an employee card solution.
Their more expensive tariffs would be a good fit for medium-sized businesses and international businesses with more complex financial and operational set-ups.
Spendesk’s joint spend management service and payment platform is a debit card-based solution. To use your cards, you need to top up your wallet with money from your company’s current business account. 3,500 companies use Spendesk.
Top up your account by bank transfer (funds available in 1-5 working days) or credit card (instant clearance with a 2% fee from the second top-up onwards).
There is no limit to the number of users you can add to your Spendesk account, which offers four different levels of access:
Spendesk tops up the Mastercard debit cards attached to an account automatically every month if funds are available.
There is a £50,000 per month limit to spending on each physical card. You can switch on or off ATM withdrawals on individual cards. Employees can make contactless payments after their first transaction using a PIN.
There is a £150,000 per month limit to spending on each virtual card. Spendesk offers single-use virtual cards (valid for one month) and virtual cards for recurring payments like subscriptions (valid for 4 years).
Spendesk integrates with Xero. Send expenses from Spendesk to Xero to instantly to help with financial record keeping. You can also match ledger codes and expense accounts across both platforms.
When someone purchases with a card, Spendesk pushes that payment directly into Xero to transfer and reconcile charges, meaning a lighter workload for the finance team.
Datev is a Germany-specific accounting software platform.
Spendesk provides its features on desktop and app. Each task on the screen layout gives you step-by-step prompts on how to complete them.
When you log in, you see how much is available on your wallet for spending, how much you’ve loaded onto cards and the total value for all pending transactions.
If you need help, there is a Help Desk section on the site and a live web chat is available, too.
Set budgets (and sub-budgets) for teams, departments and projects with Spendesk. For example, you might set a budget of £50,000 for your digital marketing team to spend.
If you want more control, you can set up sub-budgets to set limits on different types of spend within the team’s overall budget. For example, you can set a £20,000 maximum Facebook monthly ad spend, £10,000 a month on email marketing campaigns and so on.
Set different limits for individual team members where you require spending approval. You can also transfer the power to approve transactions to a team’s manager.
Spendesk offers three tariffs – Starter, Essentials and Scale. But you must contact the company to get a bespoke quote. There are no prices on the Spendesk site except ATM withdrawal fees (0.75% of transaction value) and forex transactions (2.99%).
Compared with their Essentials and Scales tariff, which have more features, their Starter tariff offers few spend management options to clients.
There is no cashback or reward scheme with Spendesk.
Spendesk is suitable for companies with multiple employees with their own budgets across different departments and locations that want better expenditure control.
Their starter tariff is good for everyday expense management, but it’s hard to compare it in value terms to the other options without getting in contact with them.
Soldo is a joint spend management platform and a prepaid debit card account for businesses. Soldo has 26,000 customers across the 30 countries it operates in.
As with the other services listed on this page (except Jeeves), you must top up your Soldo wallet before being able to use cards to make purchases. Direct deposits and Faster Payments take up to 2 hours and IBAN takes 1-2 days for GBP/EUR deposits (5 days for USD deposits)
Manage the money you transfer to your Soldo account via the dashboard and app. You can set up company wallets to allocate spending to specified projects and teams or specific cost centres like marketing and subscriptions.
From the Reports tab, you can download monthly statements and expense reports for the company, individual wallets, team cards and individual cards. Employees can request purchase approvals via the platform.
Soldo offers spending controls. You can specify daily, weekly or monthly limits per card. You can allow or disallow certain transaction types, merchant categories, supplier locations and ATM withdrawals.
Higher-level and finance team users can see outstanding balances across all accounts and wallets at all times and find out who is spending the most and on what.
Soldo’s Start tariff is free and allows unlimited card transactions, five user cards and five users (including one administrator and one accountant).
Their two main tariffs, Pro for £30 a month and Premium for £90 a month, offer additional cards, users and features. Pro subscribers get access to the payment approval system while Premium subscribers get advanced user permissions and set-up and management for team cards.
All clients get bank access, accountant access, and integration with Xero, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, Zucchetti, Sage, Datev. However, only Premium and bespoke tariff customers benefit from API permissions.
With Soldo’s API, plug in live spend and payment data to your ERP platform and allow authorised third-party providers to access your banking information.
In addition to the tariff fees, here are Soldo’s extra charges:
To add additional admin staff to an account costs between £11 and £15 per month. For accountants, you pay £9 and £12 and for employees £7 to £10. There is a £15 per month charge to add managers to Premium accounts, but Soldo waives this charge on the Start and Pro plans.
There is no cashback or reward scheme with Soldo.
Soldo’s target market is businesses with complex spending needs that require much greater analysis over budgets, expense classification, reconciliation, receipt management and expense reports.
We hope you’ve found this article useful to help you decide whether Jeeves, Soldo, Spendesk or Payhawk is the right fintech for your business. All four platforms are feature-rich, and the best one ultimately depends on your specific needs.
However, only Jeeves provides functionality and credit for free and increases profitability with uncapped cashback and fee-free forex.
If you’re looking for a credit card and spend management solution, try out Jeeves for free now.
Written by Mark Fairlie
Sources:
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