The best expense management tools for French businesses in 2026

Key takeaways

• Expense management software simplifies, digitises, and strengthens your finance team’s ability to reimburse out-of-pocket expenses for employees.

• You can choose between single-purpose expense management software or use a financial platform that offers multiple other features alongside expenses.

• Airwallex’s AI-powered expense management system scales with your business, turning a long and frustrating task into something much simpler. Plus, you get a host of other financial products to go with expense management.

When you think of expenses, do you imagine a cluttered desk with piles of receipts? Thankfully, that’s an outdated vision. Businesses in France and across the world are gaining efficiencies and saving time and money, thanks to expense management software.

In this article, you’ll get the information and confidence you need to choose the best expense management software for your business.

Best expense management tools for French businesses in 2026

Airwallex: Global-ready platform with multi-currency cards, receipt recognition, and powerful automations. Expense management is just one of many valuable features for French businesses.

Spendesk: One of France’s tech unicorns, this is a popular platform for spend control – featuring cards, approvals, and finance insights.

Qonto: Another French unicorn, Qonto provides a holistic banking and accounting product, dedicated to European businesses.

Pleo: Popular across Europe; Pleo specialises in expense cards above all else. Great for big teams with regular employee expenditure.

Soldo: Card-focused platform for teams, helping manage expenses through pre-paid, authorised, and open spend cards.

Expensify: A popular tool for growing and global businesses, specialising in expense management.

How Airwallex supports smart expense management

With Airwallex’s expense management, you get:

• On-the-go expense uploads

• AI receipt recognition on every upload

• Real-time, granular visibility of every expense

• Multi-layer approval workflows and submission criteria

• Multi-entity and multicurrency support, perfect for global businesses

You’ll also have access to our multicurrency business account, payment acceptance, and embedded finance capability.

Ilan Amar, CEO of ELEVENPARIS, says that: “Airwallex has been a game-changer for our global spend management, and we’ve seen significant and tangible benefits as a result.”

Comparing expense management tools side-by-side: features, pricing, and integrations

There are so many ways we could compare these leading tools, but, to keep things clear and understandable, we’ve chosen five key features to focus on.

A deeper look at the best expense management tools for French businesses

Features are one thing, but it’s also worth considering a more qualitative view of each provider. Let’s look in more detail at some pros, cons, and ideal use cases for these six expense management tools.

Airwallex

Pro: Truly global in outlook, you can issue cards in 40+ countries and payouts to 150+. Comes with a multicurrency account for optimally managing funds in different currencies.

Con: If you only need expense management, it may offer more than you need or double-up on products you already own.

Spendesk

Pro: Modular pricing model means you can select only the features you need and none that you don’t.

Con: Despite offering a huge range of financial management tools, Spendesk doesn’t offer eMoney/bank accounts. It can do everything except operate as the central space for your funds.

Qonto

Pro: French-founded and Europe-specialised, Qonto is built to help growing French businesses. 

Con: Long list of prohibited customer activities²⁰, excluding many industries and business types.

Pleo

Pro: Starter plan is available for free, making it a great choice for solo and micro businesses.

Con: Other plans are relatively expensive, compared to other options on this list.

Soldo

Pro: Generous and varied card provision, with options to suit most situations.

Con: Cheapest plan doesn’t feature²¹ important features like request and approval workflows or OCR receipt recognition.

Expensify

Pro: Powerful receipt and expense features, including AI recognition, audit tools, and in-app travel booking.

Con: The most restrictive option on the list in terms of number of users, with each individual user costing 5 EUR.

How expense management software works

Expense management software makes gathering, evidencing, approving, and repaying expenses a simple, digital process.

Instead of manually collecting receipts, checking their validity, updating a spreadsheet, and arranging month-end payouts, your software can do all of this for you – often automatically.

For companies with more than a handful of employees, managing expenses can become a full-time job. Expense management software makes this work easier, giving you (and your teams) more time to focus on important work, rather than administration.

Key features to look for in a modern expense management tool

It’s okay if you’re not an expert in expense management, start by checking that any provider offers the following features. These are relevant to every business.

• AI receipt reading: One of the greatest efficiencies with expense management is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and categorisation of uploaded receipts.

• Virtual and physical card issuance: Expense cards make managing employee spending easier and less of an administrative burden. The ability to offer both physical and virtual cards makes authorisation quick and flexible.

• Multi-currency: If you’re spending a mixture of currencies regularly, you need a tool that can understand the differences. It also needs to be able to communicate this accurately with your banking, accounting, and other financial systems.

• TVA support: Accounting for and separating out TVA expenses is essential. The alternative is doing it all manually, which is a bad use of everybody’s time.

• Real-time expense tracking and receipt capture: One of the best ways to keep on top of expenses is to let employees add them in real-time. A quick photo of a receipt, a couple of taps on a phone, and the expense is filed.

• Approval workflows and role-based permissions: Giving every member of your team a company card to use as they please could lead to problems. Restrictions based on pre-set rules and chains of approval ensure spending stays under control.

• Integration with accounting tools: To deliver the best functionality, your expense management tool needs to work seamlessly with your accounting software. If not, you will have to duplicate your work across both systems.

Tips for choosing the right tool based on your business needs

Clearly, there is not a singular ‘best’ expense management tool. If five businesses are searching for the best tool, they could end up with five different providers. However, we can still recommend some essential points to consider when you start the search for your right tool.

Number of employees and users

One of the biggest discrepancies between the providers on this list is how they approach adding new users and employees.

Some are happy to grant unlimited users, others will make you pay for each new one. If you have a small finance team, this is not much of a problem. If you need each manager in a 1,000 person company to have an approval account, this could become a massive expense.

When you’re considering the cost of any platform, you need to consider the overall cost of the users you’ll need.

Local vs international spend

Where you spend your money is as important as how you spend your money. If every other expense going out of your business is in a foreign currency, you need a system that can handle it at the data and transaction level.

Accounting for multiple currencies and FX is essential, as these transfers can quickly become a tangled web of missing cents and Euros.

And, if you’re making that many multicurrency transactions, reducing the cost of those payments should be a priority. A multicurrency account, with low FX margins, will deliver a significant ROI.

Regional and industrial compliance

Your system and the data it collects, processes, and creates need to be compliant. The exact needs will depend on your business and what it does.

We mentioned TVA processing earlier, as well as currency exchange and approvals, and these are just some of the compliance features you’ll need to have in place.

If your expense management system also handles payment acceptance, you’ll need to review their compliance with payment industry standards (PCI DSS, SOC1, and SOC2).

Integration and reporting needs

Expense management is just one part of your financial systems; it’s likely that you’ll have other complementary tools in place – whether that’s banking, payment acceptance, or accounting.

For your expense management tool to be most effective, it needs to integrate with these other tools. Otherwise, you’ll be faced with manual reconciliation, errors, and even less time to do meaningful work.

Your budget and their pricing model

Before you start your search, you have to know your budget. If you don’t, you could end up finding a brilliant expense management tool… that you can never afford. That’s frustrating, to say the least.

You also need to inspect their pricing model with a keen eye. One provider might have a low monthly cost, but charge a high amount for new users or card issuance. In total, over a month or a year, it could be more expensive than one with a high monthly cost and affordable pricing model.

Expense management is vital for a healthy business

Managing expenses is one of the first things any business needs to stay on top of. If you don’t, it can quickly spiral out of control and become a much bigger problem.

Thankfully, software has not just made managing expenses simple – it’s turned the process into an engine for improving cash flow and resource allocation.

Providers like Airwallex combine cutting-edge technology (like OCR scanning) with straightforward logic-based rules. The end result is an intuitive yet powerful way to keep employee expenses recorded, compliant, and approved.

What was once a company-wide challenge has been reduced to a few clicks. You just need to find the right provider to get started.

FAQs

How do I manage expenses in my business?

The easiest way to manage your expenses is with expense management software. These tools help you automate collection, approval, and reimbursement of expenses. Without an expense management tool, you’d have to keep hundreds of paper receipts on file. An automated, AI-supported system will make the process simple for you.

What’s the difference between spend management and expense management?

Spend management refers to your business’ expenditure – for example, buying a new laptop for an employee. Expense management is about paying back your employees for expenses they incur when working – for example, paying someone back after they bought a train ticket to get to a company event.

Do I have to keep all my receipts for expenses?

If you or your employees are claiming back an expense, you need evidence of the purchase – that’s what receipts are for. If you use expense management software, you can usually take a photo of a receipt using a mobile phone and upload it to the software. It will store this against the expense claim and you won’t need to keep the paper receipt. You can still keep it, if you want a physical back up.

When do expenses get repaid by a business?

Reimbursement schedules should be set out in a written expenses policy. Each business does it differently – some might reimburse on an ad hoc basis, while others may wait until month-end and process expenses with payroll. There’s not a right or wrong approach, it’s decided by each business. 

Sources and references

1. https://www.airwallex.com/fr/pricing

2. https://www.airwallex.com/fr/spend-management/cards

3. https://www.spendesk.com/fr/pricing/

4. https://helpcenter.spendesk.com/en/articles/11172891-what-s-included-in-my-subscription-plan

5. https://qonto.com/fr/pricing?periodicity=monthly&select-toggle=team&website_addon_period=yearly

6. https://qonto.com/en/pricing?select-toggle=team&periodicity=monthly&website_addon_period=monthly

7. https://qonto.com/en/payment-methods/card

8. https://qonto.com/en/payment-methods/card/virtual-card

9. https://qonto.com/en/payment-methods/card/company-fuel-card

10. https://www.pleo.io/fr/pricing

11. https://www.pleo.io/fr/business-expense-cards

12. https://www.pleo.io/fr/vendor-management

13. https://help.pleo.io/en/support/solutions/articles/103000254439-temporary-virtual-cards

14. https://www.soldo.com/en-eu/pricing/

15. https://www.soldo.com/en-eu/company-cards/business-debit-card/

16. https://www.soldo.com/en-eu/prepaid-card/virtual-prepaid-cards/

17. https://www.soldo.com/en-eu/prepaid-card/prepaid-business-cards/

18. https://www.soldo.com/en-eu/fuel-cards/

19. https://www.expensify.com/pricing

20. https://support-fr.qonto.com/hc/en-us/articles/23947720386833-Can-any-organization-open-a-Qonto-account#prohibited-activities-on-qonto

21. https://www.soldo.com/en-eu/pricing/#all-features