Paychex expense management and Paychex Flex expense management compared with standalone tools on cost

The product is older than most of its competitors. In October 2008 Paychex launched an integrated payroll and expense tool built on ExpenseWire, then owned by Rearden Commerce, and in December 2012 it bought ExpenseWire outright for an undisclosed sum. ExpenseWire was founded in 1999 in Wooster, Ohio. Paychex's package pages still list the add-on as Expense Management (Expense Wire).

What it does today, by Paychex's own description: employees submit expenses from any device, required fields stop incomplete reports, managers are notified to approve, transactions from supported credit cards and most banks load automatically, and travel bookings are pulled in from itineraries. Approved amounts are repaid by direct deposit via ACH, through payroll processing, or through accounts payable, and the data flows into payroll or your accounting system.

The payroll option is the one that matters. A reimbursement paid through Paychex payroll arrives on the next paycheck as its own line, with no second payment stream for the employee to wait on or for your bookkeeper to reconcile. We found no standalone expense tool that documents writing reimbursements into Paychex payroll. Most of them repay by their own ACH.

Keep it, or buy it, if you have field staff who drive their own cars, pay for hotels on personal cards and expect the money on payday. One vendor, one paycheck, one support line, and the add-on price is something you can negotiate together with the payroll package at renewal. Companies on Flex Enterprise with an HR team already living in Paychex get the most from it.

Look elsewhere if your spend is mostly on company cards, if you want card controls such as per-merchant limits or virtual cards for subscriptions, or if the quote is priced on every employee when only a third of them ever spend. The add-on is an expense reporting tool, not a card platform. Reviewers on SoftwareReviews also list pricing among the things they like least, which fits a product that is only sold by quote.

The very small company is a separate case. A ten person firm that only needs receipts to land in the books often does not need an expense platform at all. If your bookkeeper works in QuickBooks, a receipt scanner that posts straight into QuickBooks covers the paperwork, and a payroll admin can add the occasional reimbursement to a Paychex run by hand. Our notes on accountable plan rules explain how to keep those payments tax-free.

Paychex is not the only payroll provider with this choice. ADP sells no expense module and works through marketplace connectors instead, some of which write reimbursements onto the paycheck and some of which do not; our page on ADP expense management lays out which. Gusto includes expenses on its Plus and Premium plans, covered on Gusto expense reimbursement, and Rippling bills its module per employee, multiplied out on Rippling Spend pricing.

The Paychex add-on and every alternative above are built to repay people and record what was spent. None of them warns a department head on the 12th that the month's budget is already 70 percent gone, because each only counts a dollar once a report is approved. SpendNotify does that one job. It reads the charges from the cards and bank accounts you already use and alerts the budget owner when a department is on pace to overshoot, when a subscription renews at a higher price, or when a new recurring charge appears.

It does not reimburse anyone, run payroll or connect to Paychex, and it is not a replacement for the add-on. Plans are flat per month, from $199, or $99 a month billed yearly, whatever your headcount. How the alerts work is on budget alerts.