Managing business expenses, especially those related to travel, can be a complex task for companies of all sizes. With an array of spend management solutions available in Europe, it's essential to understand their features, integrations, and suitability for different business types. In this blog, we're going to delve into various top-rated spend management solutions, focusing on how they handle business travel expenses and bookings.

Pleo

Pleo is an original Danish spend management platform that aims to simplify the often complex process of company expense reporting. It provides company cards to employees and allows managers to set spending limits, effectively reducing the need for expense reports. With Pleo, purchases made using the company cards are immediately visible to managers, ensuring transparency and control. They mainly focus on businesses in the UKI, Nordics, DACH, French, Italian and Spanish markets.

Pleo integrates with a variety of accounting software solutions, simplifying the process of expense tracking and reducing the risk of errors. The platform also allows for the easy capture and storage of receipts, making it a user-friendly solution for both employees and finance teams.

Pleo's travel booking capabilities
While Pleo does not have an integrated travel booking tool, it offers a 3rd party integration with Travelperk. When you make a booking with your Pleo card at Travelperk, Pleo will fetch the purchase details and the invoice to add it to the expense. Of course the swift capture of receipts also means that all travel-related expenses are conveniently stored and accessible in one place.

Soldo

Soldo is a comprehensive spend management solution that helps businesses streamline their financial operations. With a focus on SMEs, Soldo offers a range of features to simplify expense management and improve financial control.

Soldo provides expense cards for employees, allowing for easy tracking and management of expenses. The platform offers customisable access rights and spending limits, ensuring that businesses can maintain control over their spending. Real-time tracking of transactions further enhances visibility and transparency.

Soldo’s travel booking capabilities
While it does not offer an integrated business travel booking tool, Soldo seamlessly integrates with third-party booking providers and supports the uploading of receipts and invoices. This allows businesses to centralise their travel-related expenses within the Soldo platform.

Overall, Soldo offers a robust solution for spend management, empowering businesses to effectively manage their finances and expenses.

Qonto

Qonto is Europe's leading finance management solution for SMEs, company creators, and freelancers. Both faster and more transparent than a traditional bank, Qonto simplifies CFOs' and CEOs' day-to-day banking, accounting, financing, and expense management. And yes, they all say it - but Qonto really is an all-in-one solution. They focus on customers in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.

When it comes to expense management Qonto automates the expense report process and helps stay in control with their Mastercard Qonto cards for your employees. It has all the bells and whistles when it comes to configuring access rights, spending limits, and real-time tracking of transactions. They target from small to medium-sized businesses and claim to have 400k customers already (November 2023).

Qonto’s travel booking capabilities
Besides using their expense cards at 3rd party booking providers and uploading those receipts and invoices Qonto does not offer an integrated business travel booking tool, nor any first-party integrations with TMCs or other travel booking tools.

Moss

Moss is a comprehensive spend management solution designed to simplify expense management for businesses. With a user-friendly interface and powerful features, Moss helps businesses gain control over their expenses and optimize their financial operations. Key Features of the platform are expense tracking, spending controls and real-time analytics.

Moss focuses on 3 core markets, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. It has quite a lot of accounting and HR integrations compared to its direct competitors, including integrations with Sage, Datev, Oracle, SAP, Workday and Exact Online, the latter because of the focus on the Dutch market.

Moss’s travel booking capabilities
While Moss does not offer an integrated business travel booking tool, it seamlessly integrates with third-party travel booking providers through what they call “merchant connections”. This allows businesses to consolidate travel-related expenses within the Moss platform. They offer this for Booking and Travelperk.

Spendesk

Spendesk is a comprehensive spend management solution designed to streamline expense management for businesses. It enables real-time tracking of expenses, issues customizable company cards with spending limits, and establishes approval workflows for reimbursement. The platform generates detailed expense reports, facilitating transparency and efficient financial record-keeping. Spendesk integrates with accounting software, automating the reconciliation process and minimizing errors. With features such as budget management and mobile accessibility, Spendesk provides businesses with a user-friendly tool to control and monitor their expenditures effectively. Spendesk is mainly targeting customers in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Spain, but is able to serve all SEPA countries.

Spendesk’s travel booking capabilities
Spendesk doesn't feature its own integrated travel booking tool. However, it provides an integration with Travelperk. Customers using Travelperk and paying with their Spendesk card will find that all payments and supporting documents, including invoices and receipts, are pushed to Spendesk. This allows a complete audit trail.

Expensya

Expensya is a solution that transforms spend management. Expensya users can manage and process any type of expense: online purchases, general costs, expense reports, remote work, Per Diems, mileage expenses, and more. Thanks to its across-the-board features and expertise, Expensya currently supports more than 5000 companies and provides a comprehensive solution to its users, for flawless end-to-end management of all business spends. Expensya targets mainly Germany, Spain, UK and France.

Expensya’s travel booking capabilities
Though Expensya doesn't have its own travel booking tool, it supports multi-currency management, travel authorizations, and automatic currency conversion. It also integrates with bank cards, HR systems, ERPs, accounting systems, and third-party travel managers like Uvet, Uber, Egencia, and Open Booking.

Payhawk

Payhawk is a powerful expense management solution designed to simplify financial operations for businesses. It provides real-time visibility into expenses, offers company cards with adjustable spending limits, and establishes efficient approval workflows for reimbursements. Payhawk generates detailed expense reports, promoting transparency and effective financial record-keeping. With its ability to integrate with multiple accounting software solutions, it automates the reconciliation process and reduces errors.

Payhawk’s travel booking capabilities
While Payhawk doesn't have an integrated travel booking feature, it does have a hybrid integration with Travelperk. As long as customers book through Travelperk, these expenses will automatically transfer to their Payhawk account.

This blog aims to help you determine the spend management solution best suited to your business needs. Many solutions offer integration or partnership options with Travel Management Companies (TMCs) or third-party booking tools. However, most do not yet provide a fully integrated travel booking experience, with this technology is advancing rapidly, we expect many spend management tools to embed a fully integrated travel booking solution into their solution. Finance teams consistently aim to enhance processes, and seamless integration with travel booking tools is highly sought after.

Travel expenses typically constitute around 10% of a company's total spending, making it the second largest expense category after payroll. This underlines the necessity of focusing not only on user experience during travel booking but also recognizing it as a significant revenue driver.

Duffel steps into this space by offering a fully configurable API integration or an out-of-the-box solution known as "Links." This enables spend management tools (or any other business) to boost customer loyalty by acting as a travel seller, fully integrated into their solution, while simultaneously unveiling new and profitable revenue streams.

If you're interested in learning more, read here what Duffel can do for spend management solutions and of course, don't hesitate to reach out!