An expense management platform with its own cards puts the card transaction, the receipt and the accounting entry in the same place, so the spending and the recording stop being two separate jobs. That is the easy part to describe and the awkward part to buy, because the four platforms UK businesses actually shortlist differ less on features than on who they were built for. Get the fit wrong and it shows up in one of two ways: a monthly fee you cannot justify against the number of people using it, or an accounting export you are still doing by hand at month-end.
We checked the card networks, named integrations and published pricing for Moss, Payhawk, Soldo and Wallester against each provider’s own pricing page on 25 August 2026. That check changed several of the figures below, and one of them reverses the advice this page used to give about Wallester.
What to Look for in an Expense Management Platform
Price is the last thing to compare, not the first. What separates these platforms in practice is whether the card, the controls and the accounting export match the way your team already works, and the cheapest plan is rarely the one carrying the integration you depend on. Six things decide it.
- Card types. Does it issue both physical and virtual cards, and can you spin up a virtual card instantly and lock it to one supplier or project?
- Spend controls. Can you set limits per card, per category and per time period, and block whole categories of merchant?
- Accounting integrations. Does it push transaction-level detail, meaning VAT codes and nominal mapping, into your accounting software, or only summary totals? And which plan is that integration actually on?
- Reporting. Can you slice spend by team, project, cost centre or supplier without manual exports at month-end?
- Pricing model. Is it charged per user, per card, on transaction volume, or as a flat monthly fee, and what sits behind a paid tier?
- Receipt capture and approval. How does it chase missing receipts, and can you configure sign-off by more than one person?
The third one is where the money hides. Every platform here will tell you it integrates with Xero, and all four genuinely do. What matters is whether that integration sits on the plan you were planning to buy, and on two of these four it does not.
Moss: Spend Management with a UK SME Focus
Choose Moss if you run a small or mid-sized business, keep your books in Xero, and want more control than a business bank account gives you without taking on enterprise complexity. The German-founded platform has genuine UK availability and is aimed squarely at SMEs rather than at groups of companies.
You get physical and virtual Mastercard cards issued through Transact Payments. A virtual card can be created from the dashboard and locked to a supplier, a project or a person, with its own limit and its own category blocks. Receipt capture runs through the mobile app, so your employee photographs the receipt, Moss matches it to the transaction, and anything still unmatched is flagged before you close the month.
The Xero integration is the reason to pick Moss over the others, and we rate it the cleanest of the four. It carries VAT codes and nominal mapping rather than dropping a lump sum into a suspense account, which is the difference between a reconciliation that takes ten minutes and one that eats an afternoon. Moss also connects to Exact Online, and to staff-management tools such as Personio and BambooHR.
Pricing is where Moss asks for patience. The free tier covers up to three users with unlimited cards and up to 20 invoices a month, which is enough to run a small team properly rather than being a trial you grow out of in a fortnight. Beyond that, Moss does not publish a price at all. You pay a single platform fee based on the transaction volume you expect, with no per-user charge, and you have to book a call to find out what that fee is. Foreign spending converts at the Mastercard rate with 2% added by the card issuer.
Moss is the right answer for a UK SME that wants one clean system and files in Xero. It is the wrong answer if you have several legal entities to consolidate, or if you need to know the price before you talk to a salesperson.
Payhawk: Enterprise-Grade Controls for Growing Businesses
Pick Payhawk when your finance policy needs more than one person to sign off before money leaves the business. It is built for mid-market and scaling teams, issues Visa corporate cards in both physical and virtual form, and puts expense management, invoice management and accounts payable in a single platform rather than three.
The approval engine is the strongest thing about it, and we found nothing on the SME-focused platforms that matches it. You can configure approval chains by transaction amount, by department or by cost centre, and stack them, so a GBP 200 taxi goes through on its own while a GBP 20,000 supplier invoice collects two signatures on the way out. Most of the rivals here assume a single approver and leave you to police the rest by email.
Payhawk connects to Xero, QuickBooks Online and Exact Online as standard, with NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365 available as advanced add-ons rather than included in the base platform. It also carries the lowest currency mark-up of the four at 0.3% on ten major currencies, which will matter more than the subscription if your team spends abroad regularly.
Pricing is mostly quoted rather than published. The one exception is the Growth Program at GBP 149 a month, for UK and European businesses with fewer than 20 employees. Above that headcount you are into a quote based on users and modules, and it generally lands above the SME-focused rivals. Payhawk earns that premium once you have several entities or a real accounts-payable process to run. Below about 20 people it is more platform than most businesses will ever use.
Soldo: Prepaid Cards with Category Management
Go with Soldo if you would rather stop overspending before it happens than discover it afterwards. One of the longer-established UK platforms, it issues prepaid Mastercard cards against wallets you pre-load, so your team can only spend what has been allocated to them and you watch the balance move in real time.
The pre-spend controls are the product rather than a feature of it. Category blocks, spending rules and per-card budgets are quick to set and quick to change, and team wallets let a group of cards draw on one shared budget, which suits a project or a department far better than giving everybody their own limit. You can sync to Xero, QuickBooks and Sage with automated VAT-code mapping, and receipts are captured in the app.
Soldo publishes its prices, which after Moss and Payhawk comes as a relief. Standard is GBP 21 a month plus VAT and Plus is GBP 33 a month plus VAT. Read the allowances before the headline, though, because both of those tiers cap you at three users and three cards. Three cards is the limit that matters here, not the twenty-one pounds. A fourth person means the Unlimited plan, and Unlimited is priced on request. Currency conversion is fixed at 1.5%.
One thing Soldo does not put on its pricing page is what a card costs to issue, or what a cash withdrawal costs. We could not find either figure there; both sit in a separate fee summary document instead. On a plan that caps you at three cards, what a card costs to issue is not a rounding error, and Soldo makes you go looking for it.
Soldo is the pick for field teams and departments that need ring-fenced budgets, because the money simply is not there to overspend. It is a poor fit for a team of six who each need a card, where the three-card cap pushes you onto a plan nobody will quote you until you ask.
Wallester: Flexible Card Issuance
Wallester is the cheapest way on this page to put a card into a lot of hands. The free plan includes 300 virtual Visa cards and unlimited physical cards, and it is permanent rather than a trial. Nothing else here comes close at no monthly cost, and that is why a marketing team running a separate card per ad account, or an agency running one per client, keeps landing on it.
Physical cards are free to issue on every plan, including the free one. You pay EUR 5 for standard delivery or EUR 20 for express, which is a postage charge rather than a card fee. The distinction is worth holding onto, because most of this market charges you for the card itself as well as the subscription. Beyond the 300 included virtual cards you pay EUR 0.35 a month each, falling to EUR 0.20 on Premium and EUR 0.10 on Platinum.
The paid plans are mostly buying card volume. Premium is EUR 199 a month for 3,000 virtual cards and Platinum is EUR 999 for 18,000, with an Enterprise tier quoted individually. Wallester Business also runs white-label card programmes alongside the standard product, which is why fintechs embedding card issuance turn up here alongside ordinary businesses.
Then there is the part that decides it, and it is the opposite of what this page used to say. Wallester added named Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite and Sage Intacct support in December 2025, and we confirmed all four on its own pricing page, so the old complaint that it cannot reach your accounting software is simply out of date. What is true is that those integrations sit on Premium and Platinum. The free tier most businesses come to Wallester for is the one tier that cannot push coded transactions into Xero. That gap is what the free plan really costs you.
So the real question is not whether the free plan is generous, because it plainly is. It is whether you can live with exporting your own data until your card volume justifies EUR 199 a month. If you need the Xero sync from day one, start your sums at EUR 199 and weigh Wallester against Moss and Payhawk on even terms, because at that price it has stopped competing with a spreadsheet and started competing with them.
The other number to watch is currency conversion, which runs at the Visa exchange rate plus 2% whenever you spend in a currency you do not already hold. Wallester lets you hold GBP, EUR and USD along with seven other currencies, so holding the right one avoids the charge altogether. Spend GBP 10,000 a month in currencies you do not hold and that 2% costs you GBP 200, which is more than the Premium subscription you were trying to avoid paying.
How the Platforms Compare
| Provider | Best for | Published pricing | Card network | Currency conversion | Key integrations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moss | UK SMEs filing in Xero | Free for 3 users and 20 invoices a month; paid pricing quoted on transaction volume | Mastercard (physical + virtual) | 2% | Xero, Exact Online |
| Payhawk | Mid-market and multi-entity teams | Growth Program £149/mo under 20 employees; otherwise quoted | Visa (physical + virtual) | 0.3% | Xero, QuickBooks, Exact Online; NetSuite and Dynamics as add-ons |
| Soldo | Pre-spend control, field teams | Standard £21/mo, Plus £33/mo (+VAT), both capped at 3 users and 3 cards | Mastercard (physical + virtual) | 1.5% | Xero, QuickBooks, Sage |
| Wallester | High card volumes on a small budget | Free (300 virtual cards, unlimited physical); Premium €199/mo; Platinum €999/mo | Visa (physical + virtual) | Visa rate + 2% | Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, on Premium and above only |
| Pricing read from each provider’s own pricing page on 25 August 2026: wallester.com/business/pricing, soldo.com/en-gb/pricing, getmoss.com/en-gb/pricing and payhawk.com/pricing. Soldo prices exclude VAT. Wallester prices are set in euros, so the sterling cost moves with the exchange rate. | |||||
Read the pricing column against the allowances sitting next to it rather than on its own. Soldo looks the cheapest of the paid options at GBP 21, and it is, right up until the fourth person needs a card. Wallester looks the most expensive at EUR 199, and for a business issuing thirty cards we make it comfortably the cheapest thing here.
Other Platforms Worth Considering
The four above cover the main options for a UK business that wants cards and expense management in one system. Five others are worth a look depending on what you are actually solving for, and we have described what each is for rather than quoting prices, because these five sit outside the price check we ran on 25 August 2026.
Pleo is the one to look at if adoption is your worry rather than control. It issues Mastercard cards, and its reputation rests on an app people will actually use, which matters more than it sounds when your VAT reclaim depends on employees photographing receipts. Capital on Tap is a different animal: a Visa business credit card with cashback rather than an expense platform, so you get a credit line and rewards but not the controls or the receipt workflow described above.
Airwallex earns its place if a real share of your spending is in another currency, because it pairs multi-currency accounts with corporate cards and you can hold the currency rather than convert every time. Revolut Business puts banking and cards in one place, which suits a team that would rather not run an account and a card platform side by side. Ramp runs a free tier funded by interchange and focuses on automated spend controls, though its UK availability has been catching up with its US product rather than matching it.
Final Verdict
Moss is the pick for most UK SMEs filing in Xero. The integration carries VAT codes and nominal mapping rather than lump sums, and that single difference does more for your month-end than any other feature on this page. You pay for it by having to ask what the price is.
Soldo is the right call when stopping the spend matters more than accounting depth. The GBP 21 a month is predictable and published, and we rate that a real advantage when Moss and Payhawk both make you ask. The per-card budget model suits field teams better than approving things after the event. Check the three-card cap against your headcount before you get attached to the price.
Payhawk fits from about 20 employees upward, where you need approval chains, several entities, and a wider accounting stack. The broader feature set carries a higher price and a longer implementation, and below that headcount you are paying for machinery you will not switch on.
Wallester is the pick when you need a lot of cards cheaply, and its position has changed since this page was last written. The old objection was that it could not reach your accounting software, and that stopped being true in December 2025.
The live objection is narrower and sharper, and we corrected this page after reading the current rate card: the accounting sync exists, but it starts at EUR 199 a month, so the free plan that makes Wallester interesting is the one plan that cannot feed your accounts. Free if you can export by hand, EUR 199 if you cannot, and at EUR 199 you should be comparing it with Moss rather than with nothing.
Expense Platform FAQs
Do expense management platforms replace accounting software?
No. They handle spend capture, receipt matching and approval workflows, then sync the transaction data into accounting software such as Xero, QuickBooks or Sage. Your accounts are still maintained in the accounting package. What the integration removes is the manual re-keying between the two, which is where most of the month-end time goes.
Can these platforms handle multi-currency spending?
All four let you spend abroad on the Visa or Mastercard network, but the charge for converting the currency varies by a factor of six. Payhawk adds 0.3% on ten major currencies, Soldo 1.5%, and Moss 2% on top of the Mastercard rate. Wallester charges the Visa rate plus 2% whenever you spend in a currency you are not already holding, so holding the right currency avoids it. Payhawk and Moss also offer multi-currency accounts. If a fair share of your spending needs converting, that percentage will decide your cost more than the subscription does.
How long does it take to set up one of these platforms?
For the SME-focused platforms, Moss and Soldo, company verification and the first card can usually be done inside a few working days, subject to identity checks. Payhawk takes longer for larger businesses, because the approval chains and the accounting integration have to be configured before anyone can spend. All four ask for company verification documents and director identification at onboarding.
Which one is cheapest if I need to issue a lot of cards?
Wallester, and it is not close. The free plan carries 300 virtual cards and unlimited physical cards at no monthly cost, where Soldo caps its GBP 21 and GBP 33 plans at three cards each. The catch is the accounting sync. Xero and QuickBooks arrive on the EUR 199 Premium plan, so a business that needs coded transactions in its accounts from day one should price Wallester at EUR 199 rather than at nothing.
Methodology and Disclosure
How we reviewed this
What we checked. We read the card network, the named accounting integrations and the published pricing for all four platforms on each provider’s own pricing page on 25 August 2026, and we checked regulatory status against the FCA Register where relevant. Feature descriptions reflect what each provider publishes.
What we corrected. That check changed six things an earlier version of this page told you. Wallester physical cards are free on every plan rather than a paid-plan feature. Wallester does have named Xero and QuickBooks support, on Premium and above. Its 2% conversion charge applies to any currency it does not hold, not only outside the Eurozone. Soldo’s plans are Standard at GBP 21 and Plus at GBP 33, not the GBP 30 and GBP 90 shown before. Moss issues Mastercard, not Visa. Payhawk issues Visa only. We have named each correction rather than quietly changing the figures.
Independence. No commercial relationship with the providers listed influenced this assessment.
Affiliate disclosure: BusinessExpert may receive referral fees from some providers mentioned on this page. This doesn’t affect our editorial assessments.