Manage your team’s expenses in any country, any currency.
One place for submissions, approvals, FX, and finance-ready payout reports.
Claims in the currency they were spent in
Employees submit from any country, in any currency. The rate for the transaction date is fetched automatically and locked onto the expense at submission, so the figure an approver validates is the figure in the payment report.
Approval rules finance edits itself
Rules fire on amount, category, requester, role, currency, or cumulative spend by month or quarter, and compose into multi-step chains. Preview one against your last 30 days before activating it, then clear the queue singly or in bulk.
A payment report your own bank executes
Approved claims land in an Excel workbook (XLSX) grouped by currency and destination account; mark them paid individually or in batches. Clara Global executes no payments, so money still leaves your account under your signatory controls.
| Criterion | Clara Global | Expensify |
|---|---|---|
| Approval workflow model and plan gating | Rules on amount, category, requester, role, currency and cumulative spend by month or quarter; multi-step chains; bulk approval; preview a rule against your last 30 days before activating. Not gated by plan. | “Default approval workflows are available on both Collect and Control plans, but custom workflows for specific members require the Control plan.” “Each employee can only be assigned one approval workflow per workspace.”[1] |
| Countries and currencies | Employees in any country submit in any currency. | “New Expensify supports global reimbursements for business bank accounts located in: United States (USD), Canada (CAD), United Kingdom (GBP), European Union (EUR), Australia (AUD).”[5] |
| FX rate basis | The rate for the transaction date, fetched automatically from a market feed and locked onto the expense at submission. With no rate published for that date, the expense still reaches the payment report in its own currency; finance applies the rate when it transfers. | “Expenses are converted using the daily average rate on the date of purchase”, taken from “the daily average trading rate from Open Exchange Rates”. “If the markets are closed (e.g., on weekends), the most recent available rate is used.”[7] |
| Who pays the employee | Clara Global does not execute payments. It produces the report; your team transfers from its own bank and marks expenses paid, individually or in batches. | “Direct reimbursement — Expensify sends payment from a connected Workspace business bank account to a member’s connected personal bank account”, or “Pay elsewhere to mark the report as paid outside Expensify”.[6] |
| Corporate card | Clara Global issues no cards; it sits over the cards and accounts you already have. | Expensify issues its own card. The US programme requires “a U.S. business bank account registered to a U.S.-incorporated business”.[8] |
| Multi-entity and workspaces | Multiple entities from Pro (Free is limited to one), each with its own rules, approvers and categories under a group-level view. | “If you have multiple workspaces, you’ll want to: Set a default workspace… Select your workspace before creating an expense or report.” Whether a workspace is meant as a legal-entity boundary is not stated on the pages cited (checked 2026-09-11).[10] |
| Receipt capture | Photo or file upload with OCR and automatic categorization, plus WhatsApp on every plan (the Free monthly quota applies). Responsive web; no native app. | “Tap the camera icon and snap a photo.” “Forward your digital receipts to receipts@expensify.com.” “Text a receipt photo to 47777 (US numbers only).”[11] |
| Integrations, API and single sign-on | No ERP or accounting integrations, no public API. OAuth SSO on every plan; no SAML, no SCIM. No travel, no fiscal-document validation, no advances or petty cash. | Its plan comparison lists “Multi-level approvals”, “ERP integrations”, “HR and payroll integrations”, “Custom expense rules” and “SAML/SSO” as Control-plan features.[12] |
| Export and audit record | Append-only audit log with 47 event types; payment report as an Excel workbook (XLSX) grouped by currency and destination account; expense lists export as CSV. | Templates named “All Data - Expense Level Export,” “All Data - Report Level Export,” and “Basic Export”, plus custom templates in “CSV, XLS, or CSV without BOM”. Whether approver identity, timestamps and the applied rule travel in an export is not stated on the pages cited (checked 2026-09-11).[14] |
| Pricing and free plan | Self-serve signup; a Free plan with a monthly expense quota and one entity; multi-entity from Pro; fraud triage, spend narratives and backtested rule suggestions on Enterprise. | Collect is “$5 per unique member/month” and Control pay-per-use “$36 per active member/month”. There is also “a free Submit workspace for individual employees”, which “doesn’t include premium features like approvals, payments, company cards, or accounting integrations”.[13] |
The workflow that fails first is rarely the one nobody designed. It is the one nobody can edit: a threshold moves, an entity opens, a category becomes a policy question — and the change has to be requested.
In Clara Global, approval rules are objects a finance administrator edits directly. A rule fires on amount, category, requester, role, currency, or cumulative spend by month or quarter, and rules compose into multi-step chains. Preview one against your last 30 days before it goes live, so its reach is visible before it is real; approvers then clear the queue in bulk or claim by claim. None of it sits behind a higher plan.
Expensify documents a different shape, carefully. Its Classic report-approvals article names three modes — “Submit and Close: Reports are auto-approved unless they contain violations,” “Submit and Approve: Sends each report to a single assigned approver,” and “Advanced Approval: Supports multi-level approval chains with conditional logic” — and a companion article states that per-employee approvers require that “your workspace must use Advanced Approvals as the report approval workflow.” Approvers act with documented verbs: “Approve”, “Unapprove”, “Reject”, “Hold”.
The evaluation question then stops being rhetorical: configure both products for the three routing cases your last quarter produced, and note the plan each setup needed.
Multi-currency pain is rarely the conversion. It is that the amount moves between submission and payment, so somebody reconciles a difference nobody decided on.
Clara Global accepts expenses in any currency, from employees in any country, on every plan. The rate applied is the rate for the transaction date, fetched automatically from a market feed and locked onto the expense at submission, so the figure an approver validates is the figure that reaches the payment report. With no rate published for that date, the expense still reaches the report in its own currency and finance applies the rate when it transfers.
Expensify publishes its own basis: “Expenses are converted using the daily average rate on the date of purchase”, drawn from “the daily average trading rate from Open Exchange Rates”; “If the markets are closed (e.g., on weekends), the most recent available rate is used.”
Both anchor the rate to the date the money was spent, which is what most auditors want. What separates them is the awkward pair: a thinly traded currency on a weekend date.
A comparison is only worth reading if it is candid about the rows where one product does not apply. Four belong to Expensify.
What it produces instead is the artifact finance executes from: an Excel workbook (XLSX) grouped by currency and destination account, expenses marked paid individually or in batches. Money leaves your own account, under your signatory controls.
Capture is where both start. Expensify documents several routes in: “Tap the camera icon and snap a photo”, “Forward your digital receipts to receipts@expensify.com”, “Text a receipt photo to 47777 (US numbers only)”. Clara Global captures by photo, upload, or WhatsApp on every plan.
After capture, Clara Global’s automation is tiered, and the tier belongs in the claim. OCR and automatic categorization run on every plan. From Pro, the Policy Agent turns your written policy into approval rules you confirm before they apply, and each expense carries an AI policy verdict while a policy is active. On Enterprise: spend narratives, fraud triage combining seven detectors with an LLM review, and suggested rules backtested against your own history before you activate them. Each ends in a flag a person confirms, not a decision.
Expensify describes its own layer: “Concierge AI learns how you categorize expenses and handles it automatically moving forward”, it “catches expense policy violations in realtime”, and a user can “click the ‘Explain’ button for the reasoning, policy, and data behind every action”.
Underneath sits the record. Clara Global keeps an append-only audit log with 47 event types and encrypts bank details with AES-256-GCM. Expensify documents named export templates; whether approver identity, timestamps and the applied rule travel in an export is not stated on the pages cited (checked 2026-09-11).
Neither product’s documentation can tell you which fits your close. Five checks will, inside a fortnight.
| What to test | Why it decides | How to run it |
|---|---|---|
| Your three hardest routing cases | A day-one workaround is a monthly workaround. | Configure three real claims from last quarter in both; note the plan each setup needed. |
| A currency finance never handles | Exercises the rate basis and the missing-rate path. | Compare the approver’s amount with the payment file, then repeat on a weekend date. |
| A second entity | Entity boundaries decide whether local control and a group view are a trade-off. | Give it its own approvers and rules; file into both entities in one month. |
| The audit answer | An auditor asks who approved what, when, and under which rule. | Answer all four for three closed claims from an export alone. |
| The bill at your headcount | One required feature can move the whole company up a tier. | Price both at your active member count, on the plan each capability is on. |
Run all five with your own data and your own people. If the incumbent wins on the evidence, you bought certainty instead of a migration.
Every Expensify statement here is a quotation from a help.expensify.com or use.expensify.com page, each re-verified live on 2026-09-11 and listed under Sources with the criterion it supports. Nothing is asserted beyond those quotations: where a page is silent, this page says the point is not stated on the sources cited rather than inferring an absence. Documentation changes — re-verify the citations at each quarterly review and refresh or remove them if a page has changed.
Every Clara Global statement names the plan the capability is available on and describes the product as implemented, not as roadmapped. No country or currency counts appear anywhere, by editorial rule. The six trial checks are practitioner guidance and are not quoted from any source.
It is an alternative for the approval and reimbursement-report half of the job, not a like-for-like replacement. Clara Global runs submission, policy checks, approval routing and a payment report for employees in any country and any currency. It does not execute payments, issue cards or connect to accounting systems — all capabilities Expensify documents.
Its Classic report-approvals article describes Advanced Approval as a mode that “Supports multi-level approval chains with conditional logic”, and a companion article states that per-employee approvers require that “your workspace must use Advanced Approvals as the report approval workflow”. Its plan comparison lists “Multi-level approvals” among Control-plan features. All three were retrieved 2026-09-11.
No. It produces a payment report as an Excel workbook grouped by currency and destination account; your finance team transfers from its own bank and marks expenses paid, individually or in batches. Expensify does pay out: it documents direct reimbursement from a connected business bank account located in the US, Canada, the UK, the EU or Australia.
Any currency, from employees in any country. The rate is the one for the transaction date, fetched automatically from a market feed and locked onto the expense at submission, so the amount an approver validates is the amount in the payment report. With no rate published, the expense still reaches the report in its own currency.
Yes, from the Pro plan; Free is limited to one entity. Each entity carries its own rules, approvers and categories while group finance reads across them. Expensify documents multiple workspaces and advises users to “Set a default workspace” and “Select your workspace before creating an expense or report”; whether a workspace is a legal-entity boundary is not stated on the pages cited.
No. There are no ERP or accounting integrations and no public API today, so the handoff is the Excel payment report plus a CSV export of expense lines. Expensify’s connections hub lists accounting connectors including “Sage Intacct”, “Quickbooks Online”, “Netsuite” and “Xero”, and its plan comparison places “ERP integrations” on the Control plan.
Clara Global has self-serve signup and a Free plan with a monthly expense quota and one entity; multi-entity begins at Pro, fraud triage and spend narratives at Enterprise. Expensify publishes “$5 per unique member/month” for Collect and “$36 per active member/month” for Control pay-per-use, plus a free Submit workspace that “doesn’t include premium features like approvals, payments, company cards, or accounting integrations”.
Written under this site’s verification rule: no factual claim about a competitor without a quotation from its current official documentation, retrieved and dated in the same editorial pass. Sixteen Expensify pages were re-verified on 2026-09-11, and each at-a-glance row links to the exact page its quotation came from.
Manage your team's expenses in any country and currency. Receipts, approvals, and bank-ready payment reports — all in one place.