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.
$9
per active user/per month
Fetch
Score 10.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Fetch aims to provide small businesses with an easy and efficient way to reimburse employees for out of pocket expenses. Employees submit expenses using the Fetch mobile app and admins can view, approve and pay those expenses directly through the web app.
The vendor says Fetch was built with one thing in mind -- getting employees paid back fast without any added burden on the admins approving the expenses.
The vendor’s value proposition is that the sleek mobile app combined with…
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
Fetch was a great upgrade for us when we started using it since we were moving from a paper/email based manual expense system. It would probably work well for a smaller company with a few departments. We pretty quickly hit a wall with it where it essentially met our needs, but we had to live with many limitations. Again, it was an improvement from a manual expense system, but there could have been more detail to the expense reporting options to handle standard situations. A few months ago Fetch announced that they were ceasing operation. I'm not sure if they were shifting directions or if they got acquired, but the expense reporting system we used went away.
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.
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.
Fetch is just simpler and works well for all the applications we require out of it. The price point is low and we don't really have any reason to shop around or find something else unless a new version of macOS becomes incompatible with Fetch.
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.
The biggest I would say is the hard-to-quantify benefit for employees to be able to deal with receipts easily - plus, constantly be informed about the status of their reimbursements and the speed at which they are getting money back. People finally don't hate the experience of expensing anymore!
Accounting's time spent on expense reimbursements is, I would say, reduced by 1-2 hours / week.
