As your business scales,  employee spend requests can get out of hand quickly. You might be taking in requests via Slack or Google forms, but approval workflows are requiring too much manual work. It can get especially complicated for purchases like software, where you need to loop in procurement, legal, and IT. 

That’s why you might be in the market for a solution to help with spend workflows and management. Which one is best for your needs? This article will help you compare Trace Spend and Zip.

Both Zip and Trace take in spend requests from employees and streamline approval workflows for the “FLIP” stakeholders: finance, legal, IT, and procurement. Both integrate with solutions like JIRA for IT tickets, Vendr for software procurement, and Ironclad for contract management. And both offer spend analytics. 

However, Trace was built to bridge the gap between budgeting and actuals, and to cover all spend–including headcount, and Zip is focused on filling the gap between intake and procurement. As a result, Trace has more finance features for planning, headcount management, and spend analytics, and Zip goes deeper on supporting vendor management.  

• Trace manages purchase, project, and headcount requests, in order to provide a more complete forecast of committed spend
• Trace provides visibility into the whole spending lifecycle, from plan-to-pay
• Zip is focused on spend management, and includes a vendor self-service portal

If you are interested in a spend management solution that was built for finance use cases in addition to procurement, read on.  This guide will help you assess the differences between Zip and Trace in four main areas:

• Creating spend plans
• Managing requests and approvals
• Connecting to  multiple systems
• Reporting and analytics

Creating spend plans

Trace allows budget owners to build and keep track of their bottom-up plans. Budget owners see their top-down targets and know when their spend decisions will put them over or under budget. Finance gets instant visibility into the latest spending plans–without having to wait for the accounting transaction to be recorded. 

Questions to consider 

• How will you give  budget owners visibility into their top-down targets?
• How will budget owners communicate their spending plans to finance?
• How will finance get visibility into changes in spending plans? 
• How will budget owners get insight into whether their spending is over or under budget?

Managing requests and approvals

With Trace, employees can make three types of spend requests: purchases, projects, and headcount. They can also request vendors. Zip allows purchase and vendor requests. Both solutions provide employees with an  easy, intuitive request experience. Both solutions enable smart approval workflows that can occur in sequence or in parallel. 

Questions to consider 

• Can  budget owners get approval to earmark funds for a project–like a marketing event? 
• How will finance and procurement get visibility into project spend early enough to provide decision support to business partners?
• Can budget owners use their own project and program names to organize their purchase requests?
• Can budget owners use one solution to request either spend or headcount? 

Connecting to multiple systems 

Trace and Zip both integrate with point solutions like Vendr and Ironclad so that approval cycles can be more seamless. In addition, Trace bridges the gap between your planning and account solutions—serving as the source of truth for bottom-up spending plans as well as the connective tissue between the top-down budget and the accounting actuals. Trace works with your planning system, your ERP solution, and your HR solution to bring you a complete picture of company spending. 

Questions to consider 

• How will you be able to compare budgeted with planned with actual spend? 
• How much time will you need to spend manually investigating variances between budget and actuals?
• How easy is it to set up the connections with your ERP and point solutions?

Reporting and analytics

Trace gives finance and business partners one place to view and analyze their comprehensive spend budgets,  forecasts, and actuals including full drill-down into GL transactions. Trace also provides reporting and alerts for vendors, contracts, POs, bills, payments, accruals, and committed spend. Zip provides workflow analytics and helps track savings for spend flowing through its system. 

Questions to consider 

• Can you create automated spend forecasts?
• Can you create budget vs. actual reports?
• Can you analyze committed spend?

Find out if Trace Spend is right for you. 

We can help you understand the differences between Trace Spend and Zip.  Contact sales to schedule a meeting today.

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