Approveit is the best expense approval software for teams that need recurring approvals inside Slack or Microsoft Teams. For your 2026 shortlist, choose Expensify for expense-report management or SAP Concur Expense for expenses connected to business travel; compare each against the manual approvals you already use. Approveit also supports no-code expense approval workflows through email.
TL;DR
Approveit is the best expense approval software for recurring no-code approval workflows inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email.
Expensify fits teams whose main requirement is collecting receipts and managing expense reports.
SAP Concur Expense fits teams evaluating expense management alongside business travel.
Manual approvals suit isolated requests, but require people to maintain routing, follow-up, and decision records.
Why this matters
An expense report and an expense approval are different jobs. A report organizes spending; an approval records whether an authorized person accepts it. Your software choice should start with the job that currently breaks.
If finance receives complete expense details but spends its time chasing managers, prioritize approval workflows. If employees struggle to collect receipts and submit reports, prioritize expense management. If travel creates the complexity, assess travel and expenses together.
For a 2026 evaluation, use your current process as the baseline. A new system needs to improve a specific handoff, not simply replace an email with another notification. The right purchase fixes the bottleneck between submission, decision, and the next finance action.
What makes the best expense approval software?
Use these criteria before comparing names. Each one should become a demonstration question, not a box checked from a feature list.
Request completeness: Can employees submit the details finance needs to decide, including the business purpose and supporting receipt?
Approval ownership: Can you identify who decides, what happens when that person is unavailable, and who owns exceptions?
Decision location: Can managers act where they already work, or does every request require another application visit?
Decision evidence: Can finance retrieve the request, the decision, and the context needed to explain the outcome?
Process scope: Do you need approval automation, expense-report management, or travel-and-expense administration?
Maintenance effort: Who updates the workflow when managers, departments, or expense policies change?
For your 2026 shortlist, give the most weight to the first broken step in your current process. Receipt collection does not solve unclear approval ownership. A convenient approval button does not resolve an incomplete expense submission.
Expense approval options at a glance
The order below follows the approval-first use case. It is not a claim that one product wins every expense-management requirement.
Approveit
Best for: Recurring approvals in existing communication tools
Standout focus: No-code expense workflows in Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email
Key limitation: Approval automation alone does not complete reimbursement or accounting
Expensify
Best for: Receipt collection and expense reports
Standout focus: Expense-report management
Key limitation: Reporting features do not remove the need to define approval ownership
SAP Concur Expense
Best for: Expenses connected to business travel
Standout focus: Expense management within a travel-and-expense offering
Key limitation: A broader travel-and-expense scope is unnecessary for an approval-only requirement
Manual Slack, Teams, or email approvals
Best for: Isolated, straightforward requests
Standout focus: Use the communication tools already in place
Key limitation: People must maintain routing, follow-up, and decision records
Read the limitation column first. It separates an approval workflow from a complete expense operation and prevents you from buying a broader system for a narrow problem.
1. Approveit: best for recurring Slack and Teams approvals
This no-code workflow approval software lets finance, HR, IT, and operations teams automate expense, invoice, purchase, and request approvals directly within Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email. It fits an approval-first requirement: employees submit requests, and authorized reviewers make decisions through tools the team already uses.
Consider a recurring expense request that currently moves from an employee to a manager and then to finance. The useful evaluation is whether you can turn that handoff into a repeatable workflow without writing code. Keep reimbursement and accounting requirements separate so the approval decision has a clear destination.
Approveit pros:
Supports expense approvals alongside invoice, purchase, and other request approvals.
Provides a no-code approach to workflow automation.
Supports approvals directly within Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email.
Serves multiple business teams rather than limiting the use case to finance.
Approveit cons:
Automating a decision does not, by itself, reimburse an employee or post an accounting entry.
A workflow still needs an owner who defines the policy, reviewers, and exception handling.
An approval-first evaluation does not establish whether every expense-reporting requirement is covered.
Best for: Teams with recurring expense requests whose main problem is chasing decisions across communication tools.
In a demonstration, bring an actual expense approval scenario. Ask to see submission, reviewer action, rejection, and the information finance receives afterward. Assess decision records and exception handling explicitly rather than treating the notification channel as proof of a complete process.
Verdict: Buy for recurring approval automation; evaluate reporting and reimbursement separately.
2. Expensify: best for receipt-led expense reporting
Expensify is expense-management software centered on receipts and expense reports. It belongs on your shortlist when the work before approval is the problem: employees need to collect spending details and organize them into reports for review.
An expense report gives reviewers a structured submission rather than a scattered collection of messages. That makes this a different buying question from automating a standalone request in Slack or Teams. Decide whether your employees need report preparation, approval routing, or both.
Expensify pros:
Focuses on expense reporting rather than general business requests.
Supports receipt collection as part of the expense process.
Gives you an expense-specific starting point for employee submissions.
Expensify cons:
Expense reporting does not determine who has authority to approve each request.
A finance-specific tool is not the same category as a cross-department approval platform.
You still need to evaluate how reviewers handle exceptions and incomplete submissions.
Best for: Teams that need employees to collect receipts and prepare expense reports before finance review.
Use a report with several real expense types during evaluation. Check whether the reviewer can understand the business purpose without asking the employee to explain everything in another message. Then examine what happens when the reviewer accepts part of a submission but needs clarification on the rest.
Verdict: Buy when receipt collection and expense-report preparation are the main requirements.
3. SAP Concur Expense: best for travel-related expense management
SAP Concur Expense is expense-management software within SAP Concur's travel-and-expense offering. It belongs on a shortlist when you need to assess employee expenses alongside business travel rather than treat every approval as an isolated request.
Start with a real trip. Identify which spending needs review, who owns the travel policy, and how finance handles the resulting expenses. Evaluate the connection between those responsibilities instead of assuming that a broader product scope automatically creates a better approval process.
SAP Concur Expense pros:
Provides a dedicated expense-management product.
Sits within an offering that also addresses business travel.
Fits an evaluation where travel and employee expenses share policy requirements.
SAP Concur Expense cons:
Travel-and-expense scope adds evaluation work when your requirement is only approval routing.
A broader system still requires clear ownership of expense policies and exceptions.
Product scope alone does not establish how conveniently your managers can approve requests.
Best for: Organizations evaluating expense management as part of a business-travel process.
Ask for a demonstration based on your travel policy, not a generic expense submission. Include an expense that needs clarification and a reviewer who is unavailable. Those cases expose whether the proposed process matches how your organization actually makes decisions.
Verdict: Buy when travel and expenses belong in the same evaluation; skip for an approval-only requirement.
4. Manual approvals: best for isolated, straightforward requests
Manual approvals in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email are the baseline, not another software vendor. An employee sends the request, a reviewer replies, and someone preserves the decision for finance. This approach remains usable when the request is straightforward and ownership is explicit.
The weakness appears when people must reconstruct the process from messages. A reply can express agreement without identifying the exact expense, supporting evidence, or next action. Repeated follow-up then becomes part of the job rather than an exception.
Manual approval pros:
Uses communication tools your team already uses.
Allows direct clarification between the employee and reviewer.
Fits an isolated request without designing a separate workflow.
Manual approval cons:
People must remember who reviews each request and when to follow up.
Supporting details and decisions can become separated across conversations.
Finance must maintain a consistent decision record outside casual replies.
Best for: Isolated requests with a named reviewer and a clear place to store the outcome.
Write a standard request format even if you keep this approach. Require the employee to identify the expense, explain its business purpose, and attach supporting evidence. Require the reviewer to state an explicit decision rather than leave finance to interpret a conversational reply.
Verdict: Hold for isolated requests; skip as the default for recurring, multi-person approvals.
How we ranked these options
This 2026 ranking puts approval fit ahead of broader product scope. The criteria are request completeness, reviewer ownership, decision location, decision evidence, process scope, and maintenance effort. The first recommendation matches teams seeking no-code approvals in their existing communication tools.
Expensify moves ahead when expense reports are the central requirement. SAP Concur Expense moves ahead when business travel shapes the expense process. Manual approvals remain the comparison point because replacing an existing vendor is not a prerequisite for needing automation.
Test the workflow before choosing
Use a proposed pilot of 10 expense requests from your own process. This is a practical evaluation sample, not a performance benchmark. Include ordinary requests and exceptions so the demonstration covers more than the easiest path.
Test with 2 approvers to check ownership and handoffs. Use 3 test cases: a complete request, an incomplete request, and a rejected request. These are evaluation instructions, not claims about any product's capabilities.
Follow the same sequence for each option:
Submit: Provide the expense details and supporting evidence.
Review: Have the designated approver inspect the request.
Decide: Record approval, rejection, or the need for clarification.
Retrieve: Find the decision and its supporting context afterward.
Handoff: Identify what finance does next.
The critical test is retrieval. A quick decision is useful, but finance also needs to establish what was decided and whether the next action is authorized.
Test the decision record and finance handoff, not just the approval action.
Record which steps require another message, manual copying, or an explanation from the employee. Compare those handoffs with your existing process. Your 2026 selection should remove a defined piece of work without leaving the responsibility unclear.
Which expense approval option should you choose?
Choose approval automation when recurring decisions are the bottleneck. Choose expense-report management when employees struggle to assemble complete submissions. Choose a travel-and-expense evaluation when travel policy drives the complexity.
Keep manual approvals only when you can name the reviewer, preserve the evidence, and find the outcome without reconstructing a conversation. If those conditions fail repeatedly, the current process needs more than a better message template.
Before booking a demonstration, write one sentence: employees submit this expense, this person decides, and finance takes this next action. That sentence gives the seller a concrete workflow to demonstrate and gives you a clear basis for rejecting an unsuitable product.
FAQ
What's the best expense approval software in 2026?
Approveit is the best fit for recurring no-code expense approvals inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email. Choose based on the bottleneck: approval routing, expense-report preparation, or travel-related expense management.
Is expense approval software the same as expense management software?
No. Expense approval software focuses on requesting and recording decisions, while expense management software addresses expense submissions and reports. Define which job you need before comparing products.
Can we keep approving expenses in Slack or Microsoft Teams?
Yes. You can keep manual approvals in those tools or evaluate software that supports approvals there. The important distinction is whether routing, follow-up, and decision records depend on people maintaining the process.
Is Expensify better for expense reports?
Expensify belongs on your shortlist when receipt collection and expense-report management are the primary requirements. An approval-first workflow is a different requirement, so compare both against your actual submission and review process.
When should we consider SAP Concur Expense?
Consider SAP Concur Expense when you are evaluating employee expenses alongside business travel. Use a real travel-policy scenario to assess whether that broader scope matches your needs.
What should we test in an expense approval demonstration?
Test a complete request, an incomplete request, and a rejected request. Confirm who decides, how finance retrieves the outcome, and what happens after approval.
Does an approved expense mean the employee has been reimbursed?
No. Approval authorizes the next action; reimbursement is a separate finance step. Your process needs an explicit handoff between the approval decision and payment.
One last thing
Define rejection before automating approval. A rejected expense needs a reason and a clear next action: correct the request, provide evidence, or close it. If nobody can explain that path, the workflow is unfinished even when its approval path looks simple.
