Melio Launches Expense Management for Small and Midsize Businesses
Key Takeaways
- •Melio Expense Management extends the company’s accounts payable and bill-payment offering into spend management.
- •The product allows businesses to keep using their existing business cards instead of switching to a new card.
- •Cardholders receive SMS or email requests for receipts, then upload a photo for automated expense processing.
- •Melio says the system extracts transaction details, categorizes expenses, and syncs them with accounting software.
- •Melio’s rollout puts it in direct competition with spend platforms tied to their own corporate cards.
Melio, a financial operations platform, has launched Melio Expense Management, a tool that lets businesses track and categorize card expenses in real time without switching credit cards or adopting new tools. The launch extends Melio's existing accounts payable and bill-payment capabilities into spend management, marking the latest expansion of its lineup of financial products for small and midsize businesses.
Rapid advances in AI are changing what is possible in small business financial operations, and Melio is leveraging this momentum to eliminate the manual grind. The new product streamlines receipt collection, automates expense categorization, and synchronizes with accounting software so that end-of-month scrambles become a thing of the past, according to the company.
Unlike most traditional tools, which require businesses to switch to a new card, Melio Expense Management lets them keep the cards they already use while handling everything around the transaction. Card-linked automation has become the default in the spend management market, where providers such as Ramp, Brex, and Bill.com's Divvy anchor their software to their own corporate cards. Approximately 90% of Melio's small business users already pay expenses with their own business cards, and with Melio Expense Management they can keep the rewards and cash back they receive from those existing cards.
The workflow is designed to require minimal effort. When a cardholder makes a card purchase, they instantly receive an SMS or email asking for a receipt. They snap a photo and upload it — no app to download, no additional account to create, and no training required. Melio then extracts the details, categorizes the expense, and syncs it to the customer's accounting software alongside their existing bills and payments.
"One of the most common needs we hear from accountants is having expenses and AP in one place," said Matan Bar, CEO of Melio. "With Expense Management, clients keep their preferred card and their preferred ledger. Accountants get the control and automation, and everyone gets the choice they've been seeking."
The rollout places Melio in direct competition with card-issuing spend platforms, and it raises the question of whether card-agnostic automation becomes a broader expectation among small businesses that want to keep the rewards tied to cards they already hold.
