Four Vendors, Four Different Meters, and One Flat Fee From Cascadia

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.

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 two weeks, 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.

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 licenses, 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.

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.

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 license arithmetic. Concur cannot be ranked against the other three at all, because it charges by report and will not quote without a call.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 center 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.

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 afterward, then stretching an expense tool to cover it is an expensive way to arrive somewhere a proper business system already is.

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.

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 licenses 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.

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.

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 centers 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.