Amex expense management: American Express expense management, expense reports and receipt matching on your Amex cards

Here is the short answer. If one owner spends on an Amex Business Gold or Business Platinum card and a bookkeeper closes the books, Connect to QuickBooks is enough and costs nothing. Once employees need to submit expenses, get them approved and have them coded to the right account, you need an expense layer, and the free Amex options only cover that if you are on Corporate Green cards earning Corporate CashBack.

That eligibility line is the thing most Amex expense management guides skip. The Amex Expense app lets employees capture receipts and submit expenses and lets approvers review them from a phone, and the app itself is free. But its App Store listing limits it to eligible customers with the American Express Corporate CashBack Program in the United States, and American Express lists each Corporate Green Card earning Corporate CashBack at an annual membership fee of up to $75 plus an annual program fee of $90. For eight cardholders that is up to $1,320 a year in card fees, offset by 1% cash back on eligible purchases, so you break even at roughly $132,000 of card spend a year.

The partner route is how larger Amex customers run expense reports. American Express says every client with Commercial Payment products is eligible for SAP Concur solutions, but the fee is set by the Concur sales team, and Concur's public page starts Expense at $7 per report on Base and $11 per report on Plus. Emburse Spend connects Amex corporate card programs and issues Amex virtual cards, at $8 per user a month on Basic or $12 on Plus, billed for at least 15 users. Sage Expense Management, formerly Fyle, lets Amex U.S. business card members create unlimited Amex virtual cards at no fee and starts at $11.99 per active user a month.

Put numbers on it for an eight-person US team where everyone files expenses on Amex cards. Connect to QuickBooks is $0 but has no approvals or policy checks. Amex Expense is $0 for the app plus up to $1,320 in Corporate Green fees. SAP Concur Base is from $672 a year at one report per person per month. Sage Expense Management is about $1,151 a year. Emburse Spend is $1,440 a year because of its 15-user minimum. Expenditure is $1,920 on Starter and $3,360 on Growth with approvals and policy checks, which makes it the most expensive line in that table, and we say so plainly.

Where Expenditure earns that difference is the work after the receipt is captured. We read each receipt and invoice at line level rather than just the total, code every line to the right QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite account, check it against your policy, route it for approval and flag duplicate subscriptions, unused seats and vendor price increases across all your spend. It works with any Amex card, business or corporate, and with the Visa and Mastercard cards and bank accounts you already carry, because you import the CSV or Quicken download Amex gives every card member for recent activity and the past six billing statements.

Nothing about your Amex program changes. You keep your cards, your Membership Rewards or cash back, your billing cycle and your credit line. Expenditure never moves or holds your money: it reads and codes what you spend and leaves the funds in your own accounts. Plans are $20, $35 or $55 per seat per month billed yearly, from three seats. It is software and insight, not financial, tax or accounting advice.