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No two of these four count the same thing. Ramp meters users at fifteen dollars a month on Plus and adds a platform fee it does not publish. Expensify meters unique members on Collect and active members on Control, and the annual term prices those two differently again. Navan meters anybody who submits a transaction that month, free for the first five of them. Concur meters expense reports at roughly seven dollars each and will not sell you any tier without a call. Underneath all four the policy is still yours to write. What needs a receipt, who approves what above which figure, which categories land in which ledger account, and what happens to the claim that turns up six weeks late are decisions rather than settings.
Before you pick an expense platform
Most businesses shopping for expense software are not unhappy with paper receipts in the abstract. They are unhappy that the month closed nine days late, that nobody can say what was spent on software last quarter without opening a card statement, and that two managers approve at wildly different thresholds because neither was ever told what the threshold is. Every product here will capture a receipt and route it for approval. What none of them settles is which categories map to which ledger account, what the per diem is, who signs off above five hundred dollars, and how a personal card purchase gets reimbursed without somebody retyping it. Those are finance decisions wearing a software costume, and if the answer is somebody who owns the configuration afterwards, what managed Zoho Expense actually covers is set out in full.
1
Four vendors, four units. Ramp Plus is fifteen dollars per user per month with twenty percent off on the annual term, and there is a platform fee on top that Ramp does not print anywhere. Expensify Collect is five dollars per unique member per month, while Control is thirty six dollars per active member on pay per use or eighteen dollars per member inside a committed annual size, with anybody active above that size still billed at thirty six. Navan charges nothing for the first five expensing users and fifteen dollars a month for each one after that, and an expensing user is anybody who submitted a transaction in that month rather than anybody holding a licence. Concur ignores headcount entirely and charges roughly seven dollars per expense report on Base and eleven on Plus. Work out your own number under all four units before any of those calls, because a company with forty staff and thirty reports a month gets four wildly different quotes.
2
A subscription hands you an empty policy engine and a login. Somebody still has to decide the categories and how they map to your chart of accounts, the receipt threshold, the mileage and per diem rates, who approves at which figure and who covers when that person is away, which cards feed in automatically and which are reconciled by hand, and how far back a late claim may be filed. On every platform here that somebody is you. Get the category mapping wrong and the reports look fine while the ledger quietly fills with miscellaneous, which is a reporting problem you tend to find at year end. The same gap runs through every comparison we publish.
3
Standing it up is the easy half and all four will sell you help with that part. What repeats forever is the upkeep. Adding the new cost centre the sales team just created without breaking the approval chain everybody else relies on, cancelling the card of somebody who left in March before it gets used again, noticing that a bank feed stopped importing and three weeks of transactions never reached anybody, adjusting the mileage rate in the week it changes, and clearing the receipt images you no longer have a reason to hold. None of the four does any of that inside the subscription. Ask who is doing it once the rollout is finished, and ask what that person costs.
Four vendors, four units of measurement, one unpublished platform fee, and nobody selling Concur without a call.
VS
Free Tier Is A Real Product
Fifteen Dollars On Plus
A Platform Fee They Hide
Ramp is the one on this page whose free tier is a complete product rather than a trial. Free costs nothing per user and still carries unlimited cards, travel, receipt capture, invoice capture, bill pay, reimbursements and round the clock chat support, which is more than most vendors put behind a paywall. The accounting side is where Free stops. QuickBooks Online and Xero are the only two ledgers it talks to. Plus is fifteen dollars per user per month with twenty percent off on the annual term, and it adds phone support, multi entity handling and the NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Acumatica and Dynamics 365 Business Central integrations. There is also a platform fee on Plus that Ramp does not publish, so the fifteen dollars is a floor rather than a quote. Procurement is a separate add on again, and 1099 filing costs sixty five cents per IRS filing on every tier including Free. Ramp says more than seventy thousand businesses use it.
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VS
Two Meters, One Product
Collect Drops Your ERP
Annual Size Only Goes Up
Expensify is the name most finance teams have already used somewhere, and its pricing is the hardest on this page to hold in your head. The marketing pricing page did not render for us twice, so these figures come from its help centre, which does. Collect is five dollars per unique member per month and is pay per use only. Control is thirty six dollars per active member per month on pay per use, or eighteen dollars per member inside a committed annual size on a twelve month term, with anybody active above that size still billed at thirty six. Collect is the cheap one and it is cheap for a reason: no multi level approvals, no ERP integrations, no HR or payroll integrations, one corporate card connection, no custom expense rules and no SAML sign on. The annual size can be raised at any point and cannot be lowered until renewal, which is worth reading twice before you commit to a number. Paying with the Expensify card can take up to half off Control on the annual term.
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VS
Free Up To 300 Staff
Five Free Expensing Users
No Zoho Books Integration
Navan is the travel company that grew an expense product, and for most readers of this page it is the cheapest real option on it. Navan Business is free for companies up to three hundred employees, and Navan is unusually plain about why: travel suppliers pay it commission. Navan Expense is free for your first five monthly expensing users and fifteen dollars a month for each one beyond that, where an expensing user is anybody who submitted a transaction that month rather than anybody holding a licence. That is a usage meter, so a quiet month genuinely costs less. Above three hundred employees there is no self serve plan at all and Navan Enterprise is a quote. The reason it may not fit you has nothing to do with price. Navan names NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Xero, Sage and Datev as its accounting integrations, plus a custom CSV export. Zoho Books is not on that list, so if your ledger is Zoho the handover is a file rather than a connection.
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VS
Priced Per Report
Headcount Does Not Matter
No Self Serve, Any Tier
SAP Concur is the odd one on this page, because it is the only vendor here that does not care how many people you employ. Base is roughly seven dollars per expense report with unlimited users. Plus is roughly eleven and adds ExpenseIt receipt scanning and the User Support Desk. Premium is a quote and brings Concur Travel with it. Per report pricing suits an organisation with a lot of staff who rarely claim, and it punishes a small team that files constantly. Forty people filing one report each costs the same as four people filing ten. What you cannot do on any tier, including the cheapest, is buy it without talking to somebody, so the figures above are indicative rather than a checkout price. It is the enterprise answer on this page, and it behaves like one on the way in as well as afterwards.
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What the flat five hundred covers
Managed Zoho Expense is not a subscription with our name on the invoice. You buy your Zoho licences from Zoho and we do not resell them, so the price you see is the price you pay. Five hundred dollars a month buys the work that sits on top of it: the expense categories and how they map to your chart of accounts, the policy rules and the receipt thresholds, the approval chains and what happens when an approver is away, the corporate card feeds and the reconciliation rules, the mileage and per diem rates, the reimbursement runs, and the integration into Zoho Books and the rest of your Zoho environment so an approved claim reaches the ledger without anybody retyping it. If the shape of the problem turns out to be the whole operation rather than the spending end of it, meaning projects, stock, purchasing and what gets invoiced afterwards, the managed ERPNext service is where that conversation goes next.
Here is the part a page like this usually skips. At the size most businesses reading it actually are, every one of these four is cheaper than we are, and it is not close. Ramp Free costs nothing per user and is a complete product. Navan Expense is free for your first five expensing users. Our figure is five hundred dollars a month flat, and flat only starts winning once the count gets large. It takes roughly thirty three users on Ramp Plus before its arithmetic passes ours, roughly thirty eight expensing users on Navan, about twenty eight members on annual Control at Expensify and only fourteen on pay per use Control, and around seventy one reports a month on Concur Base. If you are eight people and Ramp Free already reads your ledger, buy Ramp and spend the difference somewhere it will show. We would rather write that here than have you work it out for yourself after an invoice arrives.
What the flat rate buys instead is the absence of a meter. Three of the four price by people, so the quarter you take on two more staff is also the quarter your expense bill goes up, and the quarter somebody leaves is a quarter you have to remember to go and remove them. Concur avoids that by metering reports instead, which simply moves the meter onto the behaviour you were hoping to encourage. Ours does not move at all. Five hundred dollars is five hundred dollars at eight staff and at eighty, and the reason it can be is that we are not selling you licences. We are selling you the configuration and the upkeep, and neither of those gets harder in proportion to headcount.
Underneath all of it is a question about who does the tending. Every platform here will have you capturing receipts by Thursday and not one of them will mention what the reports look like in year two. A category somebody added in a hurry that nothing maps to, a card still active in the name of a person who left in March, a bank feed that stopped importing in April so three weeks of transactions were never matched, and an approval rule that quietly routes everything to one manager who clears it all in a batch on Fridays. Together those add up to a system that still loads and still looks right while the numbers it produces stop describing the business. An expense report nobody trusts is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced, because people budget against it without checking. How much of that work somebody in finance can absorb is the real question, and owners tend to be optimistic about it.
An empty policy engine changes nothing on its own. Which categories you actually report on, what needs a receipt and above what figure, who approves what and who covers for them, which cards feed in automatically, what the mileage and per diem rates are, and how far back a late claim may be filed decide whether any of it works, and every one of those is a decision rather than a setting. We read how the business already spends money before any of it gets configured.
Three of the four vendors on this page charge by how many people you have, the fourth charges by how many reports they file, and one of the three will not print its platform fee. Five hundred dollars a month covers the categories and their ledger mapping, the policy and receipt rules, the approval chains, the card feeds and reconciliation, the mileage and per diem rates, the reimbursement runs, and the integration into Zoho Books and the rest of your Zoho environment. That number is on this page rather than behind a form, and it does not move in the quarter you take on three more staff.
A broken expense pipeline rarely announces itself either. Claims keep submitting, approvals keep clearing, and the gap surfaces at close when somebody notices that a card feed stopped importing in April, or that a category has been posting to the wrong account since the day it was created. Watching the feeds, the sync connections, the approval routes and the Zoho Books integration is part of the fee rather than something bought separately afterwards.
How do you compare four systems that all charge by a different unit?
You convert all four to one number for your own company, then read what each price leaves out. Write down three figures: your headcount, the number of people who will actually submit something in a normal month, and the number of reports those people file. Ramp Plus bills the first, Navan bills the second, Expensify bills a mix depending on plan and term, and Concur bills the third. Run all four against the same three figures and the ranking usually changes at least once. Then read the exclusions, because that is where the real difference sits. Ramp Free reaches only QuickBooks Online and Xero. Expensify Collect has no ERP integration and no multi level approvals. Navan does not integrate with Zoho Books at all. No Concur tier can be bought without a call. The part no comparison table can settle for you is which of those exclusions you would actually notice.
How does an expense software decision go wrong?
Rarely on the software. It goes wrong on the chart of accounts and on the handover, and nobody quotes for either. Somebody capable sets up something genuinely useful in a fortnight, finance starts closing against it, and then that person changes role and nobody left can safely add a category or move an approval threshold. Meanwhile the structure that fitted a company of twelve does not fit one of forty, and the fixes get bolted on sideways until a fifth of the spend is landing in a category called other. Ask who maintains it before you ask what it costs.
Who owns the financial data if you configure this for us?
You do, and it is not a clause we negotiated for you. The Zoho account is in your name and billed to you, we do not resell the licences, and every claim, receipt image, card transaction and approval record stays inside it. Stop paying us and nothing switches off. That matters more here than with most software, because expense data is what an auditor asks for and what a tax authority can require you to produce years later, and the day that request arrives is not the day to work out whose login the receipts sat under.
Should we simply buy one of these instead?
For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say so here than after an invoice. If you are eight people on QuickBooks Online, Ramp Free covers you outright at no cost per user, and five hundred does not need spending. Where the arithmetic turns is headcount and enforcement: enough submitters that the per user meter starts to bite, enough policy that the rules have to be enforced rather than remembered, and enough integration that an approved claim has to reach Zoho Books and your project costing without anybody retyping it. What no platform price includes is that somebody.
Which one actually comes out cheapest?
Ramp, and we are not going to dress that up. Its free plan carries no per user charge at all and still includes cards, receipts, bill pay, reimbursements and round the clock chat, which makes it the lowest real number on this page by a distance. Navan is next, free to five expensing users and fifteen dollars a month beyond that. Our figure is five hundred dollars a month flat, so at ten staff we cost a great deal more than either of them. Flat only overtakes them once the count is large, somewhere around thirty three users on Ramp Plus and thirty eight expensing users on Navan, and the honest reason to pay us before that point is the configuration and the upkeep rather than the licence arithmetic. Concur cannot be ranked against the other three at all, because it charges by report and will not quote without a call.
What happens when something breaks after the first close?
On a subscription the platform is supported and whatever you configured on it is not, and almost everything that goes wrong is the thing you configured. A month of travel posting to the wrong account because of the way a category was mapped is not a bug their support desk can fix, because somebody mapped it. Here it is one company and one number, fixes sit inside the fee rather than being quoted for, and when Zoho ships a platform change that breaks an approval flow you depend on, that is our problem before it is yours.
Do we have to move every category at once?
No, and most should not. The usual order is corporate card spend first, because that is where the volume is and where you find out quickly whether the category mapping is honest. Personal card reimbursements follow once that is running, then mileage, then anything with a per diem attached. A once a year insurance renewal that one person pays by bank transfer can stay outside the system, and there is rarely a reason to rush it. Moving everything in one month is how a business ends up closing out of two half finished systems and trusting neither.
Can you take over an expense setup somebody else built?
Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the categories and where they post, the policy and approval rules, the card feeds and how they reconcile, the mileage and per diem settings, the user and role assignments, and the reports nobody has opened in a year, then say plainly what is worth keeping and what should be rebuilt. Inherited expense setups tend to be sound in the parts somebody tested and quietly wrong in the parts nobody did, and working out which is which is most of the first month.
How long before it actually runs your close?
Three to eight weeks for most businesses, and longer where nobody currently agrees what the policy is. The categories and their ledger mapping come first, then the policy and receipt rules, then the approval chains, then the card feeds and reconciliation, then mileage, per diems and the reporting. Configuration starts the week we begin rather than after a discovery phase that bills separately. What people notice first is rarely the software. It is that the close stopped slipping and nobody is chasing photographs of receipts by text message.
We already have a bookkeeper who handles this. What is left for you?
Quite possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns the ledger and actually keeps it current is most of this. Where we tend to be useful alongside one is the parts that are not their job at all: the category and cost centre structure that is expensive to change later, the Deluge scripting, the approval logic that has to hold when somebody is on leave, the retention rules on receipt images, the integration into the rest of Zoho so an approved claim reaches your books and your project costing, and noticing the week a card feed stops importing. Plenty of clients keep that person and hire us for the engineering around them.
When would you tell us to walk away?
Two cases, and both are common. If six people file a handful of claims a month and a shared spreadsheet already closes on time, buy Ramp Free or nothing at all, because there is no process here worth managing. And if what you actually need is the whole operation rather than the spending end of it, meaning projects, purchasing, stock and what gets invoiced afterwards, then stretching an expense tool to cover it is an expensive way to arrive somewhere a proper business system already is.
What if the software turns out not to be the problem?
We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. A close that feels chaotic is usually chaotic because nobody has written down what needs a receipt and who signs off above what figure, not because the software is slow. A fair number of these conversations end with one written policy, one person accountable for the close, and no new software at all.
What does this cost through you, stated plainly?
One flat monthly rate of five hundred dollars, listed on the managed Zoho Expense page and on this one. It covers the categories and their ledger mapping, the policy and receipt rules, the approval chains, the card feeds and reconciliation, the mileage and per diem rates, the reimbursement runs, and integration with Zoho Books and the rest of your Zoho environment. Your Zoho licences sit outside that and are billed to you by Zoho, because we do not resell them. Nothing in our figure moves when you add staff or file more reports.
What happens if we decide to leave?
Thirty days notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The Zoho account, the configuration and every claim and receipt in it were always yours and always billed to you, so there is no migration and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. Claims keep submitting, approvals keep routing and the card feeds keep importing. What you give up is the person who would have noticed the week one of them stopped.
What do you need from us to start?
Whatever you are claiming expenses through now, in whatever state it is in, read access to wherever the ledger lives, a list of your cost centres and the accounts you actually report on, and an hour with whoever chases the receipts rather than whoever owns the policy on the org chart. The walk through takes a few days and costs nothing, and it ends with a plain answer about whether Zoho Expense suits the job or whether you want something else entirely.
