How to automate expense management in Spire

Key takeaways

• Spire is accounting and business management software for distributors, manufacturers and service businesses, on premise or cloud-hosted.
• GL accounts can carry up to four segments, and segments can represent a location or profit center.
• Spire imports OFX and QFX files to reconcile bank and credit card accounts, auto-matching on amount and date.
• Vergo proposes the full GL account, texts for receipts and posts AP or GL transactions to Spire once your IT enables access.

Where should you go next?

• Vergo's Spire integration
• What expense management software integrates with Spire?
• Get started with Vergo

How do you automate expense management in Spire, step by step?

1. Enable access once. Once IT switches on API access in your Spire environment, Vergo reads your GL accounts and vendors and posts coded AP and GL transactions into Spire.
2. Connect your existing cards. Connecting your existing cards involves no card applications, no re-issuing and no banking change.
3. Collect receipts by text. Employees handle everything by text message — no app to download, no portal login — and Vergo chases missing receipts itself instead of waiting for a report.
4. Code the full account. Vergo suggests the natural account and the location or profit center segment for each line.
5. Hand off to Spire. Coded card spend is posted as AP or GL transactions, so the imported statement has entries to match.

What does Spire need on each card transaction?

• GL account: every segment, not just the natural account.
• Vendor: where a purchase is entered through AP.
• Receipt: kept with the transaction for audit.

Where does reconciliation stop and automation start?

Spire's account reconciliation imports an OFX or QFX file and matches lines when amounts agree and dates fall within 14 days, or when a check number matches. It needs an entry to match against. For a card purchase, someone has to create that entry and choose the segment. Vergo reads the receipt itself, line by line, and predicts the GL account from what was actually bought, not just the vendor name on the header, and suggests the location from where the cardholder usually buys.

A practical example

A distributor on Spire runs two branches as location segments. A branch manager buys shelving hardware and a courier delivery on one card. Vergo texts for the receipt, suggests warehouse supplies on the first branch's segment for the shelving and freight on the second for the courier, and the controller confirms. When the card statement is imported, both lines have transactions to match.

How Vergo handles this

Vergo proposes the coding by inference from your own accounting structure and history — no rule library to build, no keyword lists to maintain, and new vendors are coded on first sight. In Spire, the pattern it reads is which segments each branch and buyer has charged before. Every coding shows why it was chosen, so a reviewer confirms in seconds instead of re-coding by hand. Approval workflows are optional and fit how you already control spend: route by GL account or by amount — or skip approval flows entirely and let policy flags catch only what breaks a rule.