Brightflag, with offices in New York, Ireland, and Australia, offers their flagship legal billing application, emphasizing spend management and advanced analytics.
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Emburse Abacus
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Abacus is a web and mobile application that helps manage employee expenses and reimbursements. Some key features include: Real-Time Expense Submission, Integrated ACH Payments, and Dynamic Custom Reporting.
Abacus was acquired by Certify in summer 2018 and is now part of Emburse, formed from the merger of Certify and Chrome River March 2019.
I already recommend Brightflag to anyone and everyone who processes invoices. There is a lot of information and data that comes on these invoices, and having a system that streamlines the information in one place has been extremely useful for a department that is a cost center and needs a quick way to justify every spend.
Abacus is great for smaller companies that need to automate expense management. It is a very user-friendly system that makes it easy for all employees to understand without any training. We have heard of issues with their AMEX program. Companies that have tens or hundreds of corporate AMEX cards should likely explore other options
It is a very useful platform it helps me effectively, it allows me to put restrictions on the dates, till a card could be used.
Embrace Abacus has provided me much relief and saved my time which was spent in chalking out the financial status of my organization.
Emburse Abacus has equipped me with amazing features which are helping me to automatically set various limits about the expenditures and I always remain up to date about any purchase.
I think this just has to do with how we use it but when go in to select a "category" or "event," it looks a little cluttered and can be hard to find what you are looking for.
It will not allow you to attach 2 items unless you are doing a split. This is not really an issue but there are times where I would like to include a screenshot with additional information and I have to put everything into one picture.
Super easy to set up and use. The interface is intuitive, but it's worth spending some time getting used to seeing where the different "file cabinets" are located. I recommend having one person dedicated to the day-to-day management of the platform (separate from the reviewers and approvers), someone who just manages to upload the invoices, setting up new vendors, liaising with BF Support, but cross-training everyone who uses it on the broad functions.
Customer support is spectacular. Probably the single best quality of this product. They are quick to respond, quick to troubleshoot, and quick to offer suggestions on workarounds for things that might still be in the works (or unique to us). That level of agility and can-do attitude is what I needed in a partner like this.
I have never had to contact Abacus support and have not heard stories from any of my colleagues having to do so either. Our accounting department stresses the ease of Abacus and has not voiced any concerns with the software or the product support team or the product support process.
We migrated from SAP Concur to Emburse Abacus after carefully considering a number of factors. Total cost of ownership, new user training and adoption, direct integration with our ERP, and the ability to process individual expenses in real-time as opposed to processing monthly expense reports all weighed in Abacus' favor during the decision and selection process.
ROI has been superb: saw a 30% drop in legal spend (based on invoice amount) due to catching items that shouldn't have been charged or charges that exceeded agreed-upon caps.
Being able to add prior years' invoices to the system has been incredible since it allows for internal benchmarking and YoY comparison reporting.
It does seem like they are still working out some kinks in the web and mobile apps – a few times the app has crashed. But they're also very fast to push updates.
The benefits are simple. No one likes taking time out of their day to do expense reporting. Abacus speeds that process up considerably. The interface is clean, and I'm able to see what expenses are pending vs. expenses that are already cleared.
The benefit from a user standpoint is that it adds an element of organization to a process that is typically disorganized. It has saved us numerous hours.
