How it works
Real-time expense tracking in three steps
Real-time expense tracking checks every charge against your budgets the moment it happens, instead of weeks later in an expense report. SpendNotify takes in the charges from the cards and accounts your company already uses and alerts you the second a limit breaks.
No sales call. Plans are flat per month, not per user.
The three steps
Send charges in, set limits, get the alert
01Send in charges from the cards you already have
Keep the corporate cards and bank accounts your company already runs, and pick how their charges reach SpendNotify. Most teams use two of these side by side:
- iPhone Shortcut for Apple Pay. A one time automation in the Shortcuts app (iOS 17 and later) sends every Apple Pay payment to your private SpendNotify URL. The alert email arrives within seconds.
- Forwarded bank emails. Turn on your bank's email for every card transaction and forward it to your private address, app+in-…@spendnotify.com. The alert follows within about a minute.
- Statements. Email or upload a CSV, OFX or QFX statement from any bank, daily or whenever you like.
- Card provider export. If your card provider publishes an HTTPS export, SpendNotify checks it every 5 minutes. A CSV upload in the dashboard works too.
You never give SpendNotify a bank login. You do not switch banks, issue new cards, or move a single payment. Finance keeps its existing setup and gains a monitoring layer on top of it.
02Set budgets and limits per employee, team and category
Give every employee, team and spend category its own monthly budget: software, travel, meals, ads, equipment, whatever your ledger uses. Each budget carries two thresholds, a warning at 80 percent and a breach at 100 percent, and you can tune anomaly sensitivity for unusual charges. Setting budget alerts takes minutes, not a rollout project.
03Get the alert the moment something crosses a line
When a charge takes a budget past its threshold, duplicates an earlier payment, or looks unlike anything that employee normally spends, SpendNotify sends the alert by email, Slack or webhook right away. The dispatch names the rule, the amount, and who spent it, so you can act while the situation is still small. Month-end close stops being the place where you find out.
Architecture
Read-only by design, so it monitors and never moves money
SpendNotify is a monitoring and alerting tool, and only that. It does not replace your accounting software, does not issue cards, does not hold funds, and cannot move or block a payment. It only receives the charges you send it and holds no bank login, which means the worst thing the system could ever do with your money is describe it.
That constraint is deliberate. Tools that promise real-time control usually get it by making you adopt their card and their banking. SpendNotify takes the other trade: it watches the corporate cards you already have and puts the speed into the alert instead of the payment rail. You can read more about data handling on the expense management security page.
The full capability list, from anomaly detection to the live dashboard, is on the expense tracking software features page.
The alerts themselves
What triggers a real-time expense alert and who gets it
Real-time expense alerts are messages sent to the person who owns a budget when a card or account charge breaks a rule you set, within minutes of the charge posting rather than at month-end. The main kinds are a budget warning at 80 percent, a breach at 100 percent, a pace alert when spend so far projects past the budget by month end, a duplicate charge (same merchant and amount within 48 hours), an amount outlier (more than three times that employee's usual charge), a first-time merchant, off-hours spend, a subscription price increase and an annual renewal 14 days ahead.
Each alert goes by email to every seat on your plan, so put the budget owners on the seat list rather than a shared finance inbox, plus your Slack channel and, from Growth up, your webhook. The person who can fix it is the one who approved the spend. Finance still sees everything on the live dashboard.
What is real-time expense tracking?
Real-time expense tracking means company spending is recorded and checked against budgets as each transaction posts, instead of when receipts are submitted or the books close. The point is timing: an overspend or a duplicate payment is visible the same day, while it can still be stopped or recovered. It complements month-end expense audit software, which checks reports after they are filed.
See it run
Watch a month of spend replay in your browser
The demo replays 30 days of card transactions and shows exactly which alerts would have fired. Create your SpendNotify account with your work email.