Best Expense Software for Hotels 2026

Why hospitality has expense and AP needs generic tools cannot handle

Ramp

Stampli

Brex

Expensify

Concur

BILL.com

Tipalti

The first thing most finance teams in this industry learn the hard way is that an expense management tool built for a SaaS company or a consulting firm will simply not work for a 15-location restaurant group or a hotel management company running 30 branded properties. The core problem is data volume and data complexity at the same time. A mid-size restaurant group might process 400 to 800 vendor invoices per week across multiple concepts, with invoices arriving from food distributors, linen services, repair contractors, and alcohol wholesalers, often on net-30 or net-60 terms. Generic tools handle the approval workflow fine but break down the moment you need to split a produce invoice across three outlet cost centers or reconcile a vendor statement where the same distributor bills each property on a different cycle.

Food cost tracking is the second breakdown point. In a restaurant, every invoice from a food or beverage vendor is simultaneously an accounts payable transaction and a cost-of-goods input. Your executive chef needs to see that the beef tenderloin landed at $34 per pound this week versus $28 last week, and your CFO needs that cost allocated to the specific menu category before the weekly P&L is run. Tools like Ramp, Brex, and Expensify are designed to approve spend and code it to a GL account. They are not designed to push line-item ingredient costs into an inventory system or feed a food cost percentage report by menu category. That functionality requires either a purpose-built restaurant accounting platform like Restaurant365 or a carefully configured middleware layer between your AP tool and your inventory software.

Multi-property P&L visibility is the third challenge. Hotel management companies are contractually required to provide property-level financial statements to each owner, often on a schedule defined in the management agreement. The chart of accounts must conform to USALI (Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry), now in its 12th edition effective January 2026, which defines exactly how revenue and expense categories are structured and reported. A generic AP tool that codes everything to a flat chart of accounts will force your hotel accountants to spend days each month re-coding and re-mapping entries before they can produce owner statements. This is not a minor inconvenience. It routinely adds one to two weeks to month-end close for properties that use the wrong tools.

Tip and gratuity reporting creates a compliance obligation that no generic expense tool addresses at all. If you operate a food or beverage establishment that normally employs more than 10 people on a typical business day, the IRS requires you to file Form 8027 annually, reporting total food and beverage receipts against total tips reported by employees. If the reported tips fall below 8% of gross receipts, you must allocate the shortfall to individual W-2s. This requires your payroll, POS, and accounting systems to talk to each other with daily accuracy. An expense management tool that does not integrate with your POS and payroll system simply cannot support this workflow, and the consequences of getting it wrong include IRS penalties and potential employment tax assessments.

Tool-by-tool breakdown for hotels and restaurants

Ramp is the best starting point for restaurant groups under 10 locations that primarily need corporate card control and vendor bill pay rather than full AP automation. The free Standard tier includes unlimited virtual cards, automated receipt collection, and basic accounting sync, which covers a surprising amount of what a small restaurant group actually needs day to day. Ramp Plus at $15 per user per month adds multi-entity management and deeper ERP integrations. The key limitation for hospitality is that Ramp is fundamentally a spend management platform, not an AP platform. It handles employee expense cards well and can pay vendors via ACH (now $0.59 per transaction as of June 2026), but it does not capture invoices from a vendor portal, route them for approval, or push line-item food costs into an inventory system. If your primary problem is controlling what your managers spend on their corporate cards, Ramp is excellent. If your primary problem is processing 600 food-service invoices a week, Ramp alone will not solve it.

Brex at its Premium tier ($12 per user per month) offers similar corporate card and expense management capabilities to Ramp, with slightly stronger international payment support and travel rewards that matter more if your hotel's operations team is frequently traveling between properties. Capital One acquired Brex in January 2026, and while the product continues to operate normally, buyers should be aware that the acquisition may lead to changes in the platform's roadmap or pricing structure. Brex does not offer meaningful hospitality-specific AP workflows. It is a reasonable choice for a hotel management company's headquarters team managing employee travel and expense, but it should not be the primary tool for property-level AP processing. The Essentials tier is free but does not include the multi-entity or ERP integration features that most multi-property operators need.

Expensify at $5 per user per month (Collect plan) or $9 per user per month (Control plan, with Expensify Card) is the right fit for small independent restaurants that need something simple and affordable for employee reimbursements and receipt capture. Its SmartScan receipt OCR is genuinely reliable and integrates with QuickBooks and Xero with minimal configuration. The problem for larger hospitality operations is that Expensify's pricing has been opaque and subject to significant changes. Some users reported unexpected price increases of 80% to 4x their original rates after product restructuring, and customer support quality at the SMB tier is a consistent complaint. For a hotel group or multi-concept restaurant company, the lack of hospitality-specific workflows, multi-entity consolidation, and POS integration makes Expensify a tool that teams outgrow quickly.

SAP Concur is the enterprise standard for travel and expense at large hospitality corporations, multinational hotel brands, and companies that need airtight compliance and audit trails across thousands of employees. Pricing is entirely quote-based, typically running $8 to $18 per active user per month for expense management, with additional per-transaction fees for travel booking and per-invoice fees for AP automation ($2 to $8 per invoice processed). For large hotel brands or contract food service companies with complex reimbursement policies and global operations, Concur's compliance infrastructure is hard to match. For anyone under 500 employees, the implementation cost, IT resources required, and contract complexity will significantly outweigh the benefits. The interface is widely criticized as dated, batch processing means accounting updates happen overnight rather than in real time, and most travel changes still require contacting an agent rather than self-service.

Navan (formerly TripActions) is a travel-first platform that has added expense management capabilities. At $15 per active user per month for expense management (with the first five users free), it earns top G2 rankings for combined travel and expense management. For hotel corporate offices or hospitality management companies where the finance team and operations executives travel frequently between properties, the integrated booking and expense workflow genuinely reduces reconciliation effort. The risk for restaurant and hotel operators is that the travel-centric design means the AP automation and vendor payment capabilities are limited compared to dedicated AP platforms. Navan is a strong choice for the expense management layer of a hospitality business, but it should be paired with a separate AP tool for high-volume vendor invoice processing.

Divvy, now operating as BILL Spend and Expense, combines corporate card management with spend controls and budgets at the department or location level. The rewards model offers up to 7x points on restaurant spend and 5x on hotels for weekly payers, which is attractive on paper. The honest reality is that the entire rewards structure is built around incentivizing weekly card payments and high transaction volume. The expense management software is competent, but the platform is designed to support the card product rather than the other way around. For a restaurant operator who primarily needs to control what location managers spend, Divvy's budget controls work well. For accounts payable processing of vendor invoices, BILL.com (the AP product) at $45 to $79 per user per month is the appropriate product, not Divvy.

BILL.com for AP automation is priced at $45 per user per month (Essentials), $55 per user per month (Team), or $79 per user per month (Corporate), with ACH transaction fees of $0.59 per payment. For independent restaurants or small hotel groups processing under 200 invoices per month, BILL.com covers the core workflow: invoice capture, approval routing, and ACH vendor payment. The limitation is that BILL.com is a general-purpose AP tool and does not understand hospitality-specific data structures. There is no native understanding of food cost categories, USALI account structures, or multi-property owner reporting. It integrates with QuickBooks, Sage, and NetSuite but requires significant configuration to produce the property-level reporting that hotel management companies need.

Spendesk and Pleo are European-originated spend management platforms that have limited footprint and integration depth in the US hospitality market. Both offer smart company cards, receipt capture, and budget controls with clean interfaces. Pleo starts around $9.50 per user per month in their home markets. For US-based hotel or restaurant operators, the lack of native integrations with US-specific POS systems (Toast, Micros), US payroll providers, and US hospitality accounting platforms (M3, Aptech) makes these tools a poor fit as a primary solution. They may work adequately for a European hotel group's expense management layer but should not be evaluated seriously against Ramp or Brex for a US hospitality operation.

Tipalti is worth serious consideration for hotel management companies that have significant international vendor relationships, multi-currency payment needs, or complex 1099/W-9 compliance requirements across large vendor networks. Pricing starts around $149 per month for the platform fee, with per-transaction fees varying by payment method ($0.40 for domestic ACH, $2.95 to $5 for global ACH, $15 for US wires, $26 for international SWIFT). Implementation costs for mid-market operators run $5,000 to $15,000, and enterprise setups can reach $50,000 or more. The trade-off is that Tipalti's strength is global payment automation and vendor compliance, not hospitality-specific AP workflows. If your primary pain is paying 500 domestic food and linen vendors on net-30 terms, Tipalti is more platform than you need.

AvidXchange with its AvidSuite for Hospitality module is one of the most purpose-built solutions for hotel management companies processing high volumes of property-level invoices. The platform integrates directly with M3, a common hotel accounting system, and connects with major ERPs including Oracle NetSuite, Sage, and Acumatica. Island Hospitality, one of the largest independent hotel operators in the US managing 170 properties for Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott, uses AvidXchange and reports 80% reduction in processing time. Pricing starts around $440 per month but is quote-only for hospitality deployments, and the actual cost scales significantly with property count and invoice volume. The main caution is that AvidXchange's hospitality module page does not list direct integrations with major PMS platforms like Opera or Cloudbeds, so buyers should verify PMS connectivity explicitly in their evaluation.

Stampli is an AP automation platform designed from the ground up for AP departments rather than for finance generalists, and that distinction matters for hospitality. Stampli's Billy the Bot achieves around 86% automation rate across invoice coding and approval routing, and the platform's collaborative inbox model (where all communication about an invoice happens directly on the invoice) works well for properties where the executive chef, food and beverage director, and controller all need to touch a vendor invoice at different stages. Stampli does not publish pricing and requires a custom quote, but SMB deployments typically start around $45 per month, scaling significantly with invoice volume. Stampli integrates with over 70 ERPs and accounting systems. For mid-size restaurant groups or hotel portfolios where the AP process involves multiple approvers per property but IT resources are limited, Stampli's implementation simplicity is a genuine competitive advantage over AvidXchange.

Restaurant365 deserves mention even though it is not primarily an expense management or AP tool, because for restaurant groups it is the only platform that natively connects AP, food cost tracking, inventory, and accounting in a single data model. AP invoices sync directly to inventory units, which updates theoretical food cost calculations, which feeds the P&L by location in real time. This is the workflow that every other tool on this list requires custom integration to replicate. The cost is substantial: operators with 8 or more locations can expect $4,000 to $9,000 per month all-in, plus $20,000 to $50,000 in setup costs. That is the right answer for a 20-location casual dining group. It is almost certainly the wrong answer for a three-unit independent restaurant.

Compliance and regulatory requirements specific to the industry

IRS Form 8027 compliance is the most commonly overlooked regulatory requirement in restaurant finance. Any food or beverage establishment located in the US, providing food for on-premises consumption, where tipping is customary, and that employed more than 10 people on a typical business day in the prior year must file Form 8027 annually by the last day of February (March 31 for electronic filing). The form requires you to report total gross receipts from food and beverage sales and total tips reported by employees. If reported tips are less than 8% of gross receipts, you must allocate the shortfall to individual tipped employees' W-2s based on a formula. This requires your POS system to report daily sales accurately, your payroll system to capture declared tips, and your accounting system to reconcile the two on a per-period basis. No generic expense management tool supports this automatically.

USALI 12th Edition became the standard effective January 1, 2026, and compliance matters practically because hotel brand standards and management agreement reporting requirements typically reference it. The 12th edition updated the departmental expense structure, including changes to food and beverage expense categories (Food Cost at account 5101, Beverage Cost at 5102, Kitchen Supplies at 5103) and labor reporting. If your AP or accounting tool was configured for an earlier USALI edition, the account mapping may now be incorrect, producing financial statements that do not reconcile to brand-required reporting formats. Any AP tool or accounting platform deployed at a branded hotel should be verified against the 12th edition chart of accounts before go-live.

Alcohol purchasing compliance creates an AP-specific complication that most software teams do not anticipate. In most US states, you must pay for alcohol purchases with a check or credit card at the time of delivery or within a short payment window defined by state law, often 10 to 30 days. You cannot carry alcohol invoices on net-60 terms the way you might carry a linen or chemical supply invoice. Your AP tool needs to accommodate different payment term rules by vendor type, ideally with automated reminders or payment scheduling to prevent compliance violations. This is a configuration-level feature, not a platform-level one, but if your AP tool does not support vendor-level payment term rules, you will need manual processes to manage it.

Sales tax on food and beverage is genuinely complex in the US because taxability rules vary by item category, preparation method, and jurisdiction. In many states, a bottle of water sold at a hotel minibar is taxable but the same bottle of water included in a room rate amenity package may be exempt, or taxed at a different rate. Alcohol is typically taxed separately from food, and catering and banquet event orders often have their own tax treatment. Your AP tool is not typically where sales tax is calculated (that happens in the POS or event management system), but your expense and AP platform needs to be able to pass through the correct tax coding from invoices without overriding or losing the POS-level tax data during reconciliation.

Integration requirements: POS, PMS, and hospitality accounting systems

For restaurants, the critical integration chain runs from POS to AP to inventory to accounting. Toast, which dominates the independent restaurant POS market in the US, integrates with Sage Intacct via xtraCHEF (now a Toast product), with QuickBooks via Bookkeep and other middleware, and with Restaurant365 natively. Micros (Oracle OPERA Cloud POS) integrates with Oracle ERP natively and with most major accounting platforms via its API. Lightspeed Restaurant integrates with Xero and QuickBooks. The key question for any AP tool evaluation is not whether it integrates with QuickBooks, but whether the POS daily sales journal entry and the AP invoice cost data both land in the accounting system in the correct GL accounts automatically, without a controller manually reconciling the two sources each week.

For hotels, the integration chain runs from PMS to accounting to AP. OPERA Cloud (Oracle) is the dominant PMS at branded hotels and integrates with Oracle OPERA GL for accounting, with connections to third-party accounting platforms via APIs. Cloudbeds, common at independent hotels, integrates with QuickBooks Online and Xero directly, and with Sage Intacct via Omniboost. M3 is a hotel-specific accounting platform used by management companies that manage multiple properties across multiple brands, and it integrates directly with AvidXchange for AP, with Ramp for corporate card expense, and has its own native GL that conforms to USALI. If a hotel management company is already on M3, the AP tool choice is largely predetermined: AvidXchange has the tightest M3 integration, and going with a generic tool like BILL.com or Stampli will require custom mapping work to make the data land correctly in M3's account structure.

Craftable is worth knowing about as a standalone food cost and beverage management platform that integrates with over 100 POS systems including Toast, Micros, Aloha NCR, Lightspeed, and Square, and syncs to QuickBooks, Sage, Acumatica, and Microsoft Dynamics. For restaurant groups that are not ready to move to Restaurant365 but need better food cost tracking than their current setup provides, Craftable can serve as the middleware layer between POS and accounting, handling purchase orders, invoice matching, and recipe costing. It is not an AP automation tool in the full sense, but it fills a gap that most general AP tools leave open.

Payroll integration deserves specific attention for tipped employee operations. The daily tip reconciliation workflow should flow from POS to payroll automatically, with tip pooling calculations, service charge distributions, and FICA tip credit calculations handled without manual spreadsheet work. ADP, Paychex, and Gusto all integrate with major POS systems to varying degrees, but the quality of that integration matters more than its existence. In a restaurant operating tip pooling across front-of-house staff, a payroll integration that delivers summary totals rather than individual employee tip amounts will still require manual work at the payroll admin level every pay period. When evaluating AP and expense tools, ask your payroll vendor explicitly which POS systems they integrate with at the transaction level versus the summary level.

What to watch out for when evaluating vendors

The most common overpromise in this category is the PMS or POS integration claim. Vendors will say they integrate with Opera, Toast, or Micros during a sales call, and they are technically correct in that data can flow between the systems. What they do not always volunteer is that the integration is via CSV export on a manual or scheduled basis, not a real-time API connection, or that it maps to a generic chart of accounts rather than your specific GL codes, or that it was built for one version of the POS software and has not been updated since. Ask for a technical data flow diagram showing exactly how each field in a vendor invoice or POS daily close maps to a GL entry in your accounting system, and ask which system of record owns each data point when there is a conflict.

Pricing opacity is a serious problem in the AP automation segment specifically. AvidXchange, Stampli, Tipalti, and Navan Enterprise all require custom quotes and do not publish standard pricing. This means you are negotiating against a vendor who knows their cost structure and you do not. The practical advice is to get quotes from at least three platforms before negotiating with any of them, share the competitive quotes openly (vendors in this space expect it), and pay close attention to what the per-invoice or per-property fee structure looks like at your actual invoice volume rather than the volume the sales team assumes. A platform that looks reasonably priced at 200 invoices per month can become very expensive at 800 invoices per month if it uses tiered per-transaction pricing.

Hospitality vendor overselling is particularly common around the multi-property consolidation capability. Vendors will demonstrate a dashboard showing P&L across multiple locations, which works well in a demo with clean synthetic data. Ask to see it loaded with your actual property count, your actual account structure, and invoices split across cost centers the way your current properties split them. The failure modes only appear under real data conditions. A hotel management company that manages 25 properties across six different brand standards and three different ownership structures will find that the consolidation dashboard that looked clean in the demo requires significant chart-of-accounts mapping work before it reflects reality, and that mapping work is usually billed as implementation services.

Watch out for the implementation timeline mismatch. Generic AP tools like BILL.com can be operational in a week. Hospitality-specific configurations of AvidXchange, Tipalti, or Restaurant365 take six to twelve weeks minimum, and multi-entity hotel rollouts with full M3 integration typically take three to six months. If a vendor tells you implementation for a 20-property hotel group will take four weeks, that is a red flag. The month-end close cycle means any configuration problem discovered in month two costs you a full month of double-entry work to unwind. Build a realistic implementation timeline into your decision criteria, and ask for a project plan with specific milestones before signing.

Recommendations by organization size

Independent restaurants (one to three locations) with fewer than $5M in annual revenue should start with Ramp's free tier for corporate card management and Expensify Collect at $5 per user per month for employee reimbursements. For vendor invoice AP, BILL.com Essentials at $45 per user per month handles the volume adequately and integrates with QuickBooks Online, which most operators in this segment are already using. The total monthly cost for a three-person finance team runs $150 to $200, which is appropriate for the scale. The gap that will remain is food cost tracking, which these tools do not address. A separate spreadsheet-based food cost template or a lightweight tool like xtraCHEF (now part of Toast) will cover that need without adding significant cost.

Growing restaurant groups (4 to 15 locations) face the point where generic tools start creating more work than they save. At this scale, the recommendation is Ramp Plus at $15 per user per month for corporate cards and employee expenses, paired with either Stampli or BILL.com Corporate for AP automation. If the group is on Toast, the xtraCHEF integration with Sage Intacct creates the best food cost to accounting data pipeline at this size. Budget approximately $2,000 to $4,000 per month all-in for a 10-location group. Restaurant365 becomes worth evaluating seriously around 8 to 10 locations, particularly if the group is growing quickly and the CFO is spending significant time on manual reconciliation between food cost, AP, and accounting data.

Hotel management companies (5 to 30 properties) operating under brand standards should prioritize USALI 12th edition compliance and PMS integration above all other criteria. AvidXchange with the AvidSuite for Hospitality module is the strongest purpose-built choice for this segment, particularly if properties are already using M3 for accounting. The combination of AvidXchange for AP and M3 for hotel accounting is the de facto standard among mid-market US hotel management companies for good reason: the integration is deep, the workflow maps to how hotel accounting teams actually operate, and the vendor has genuine hospitality case studies at comparable scale. Pair this with Navan or Ramp Plus for corporate travel and employee expenses at the management company level. Budget $2,000 to $6,000 per month for AP automation at this scale, depending on property count and invoice volume.

Large hotel groups and multi-concept restaurant companies (30-plus locations, or managing enterprise brand contracts) are in Concur or Tipalti territory for the complexity of compliance, multi-currency payments, and audit trail requirements. At this scale, the question is less about picking the right tool and more about structuring the implementation correctly. SAP Concur for travel and expense at the corporate level, combined with AvidXchange or a property-specific AP tool at the unit level, is the most common configuration at branded hotel companies managing more than $100M in annual revenue. Tipalti becomes appropriate when the payment footprint includes significant international vendor payments, particularly in markets like Southeast Asia or the Middle East where hotel supply chains can involve dozens of currencies. Do not underestimate implementation costs at this scale. A 40-property Concur rollout with full PMS integration typically costs $500,000 to $1.5M in implementation services before the software cost is even considered.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best expense management software for hotels? AvidXchange and M3 are the most widely adopted tools for hotel expense management. AvidXchange automates accounts payable and invoice routing across multi-property portfolios, while M3 is purpose-built for hotel accounting with native USALI chart of accounts support. Both integrate with major property management systems like Opera and Maestro.

How does USALI affect hotel expense tracking? The Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI) is the industry-standard chart of accounts that organizes hotel expenses by department, rooms, food and beverage, spa, and so on. Using USALI-compliant software ensures that departmental profit-and-loss statements are comparable across properties and meet lender or franchise reporting requirements. M3 Accounting and Sage Intacct Hospitality both ship with pre-built USALI account structures.

What software do restaurants use to track food costs? Restaurant365 is the leading restaurant-specific platform for food cost tracking, combining accounting, inventory, and vendor invoice management in one system. Prices start around $435 per month per location. It syncs with POS systems like Toast and Square so actual sales mix is automatically compared against theoretical food cost, flagging variance in near-real time.

How does Ramp handle tip reconciliation for restaurant groups? Ramp's corporate card platform captures itemized spend at the point of sale and lets managers code tips as a separate line item against the correct cost center. When paired with a payroll integration such as Gusto or ADP, tip amounts reconcile directly to payroll records, reducing the manual spreadsheet work that causes FICA tip-credit errors. Ramp does not charge transaction fees and offers cashback rebates that offset software costs.

Can one expense management platform work for both hotel and restaurant operations? Most operators run separate platforms for each: AvidXchange or M3 for the hotel side and Restaurant365 or Ramp for food-and-beverage outlets. A shared general ledger in NetSuite or Sage Intacct can consolidate both into one reporting layer, giving ownership groups a single view of EBITDA across property types without forcing either operation onto a tool not designed for it.

Rooms and housekeeping aside, our best expense management software roundup covers the broader field. If food and beverage cost tracking is your primary concern rather than rooms and housekeeping, see the restaurants section of our best expense management software roundup.