Emburse Certify vs. Precoro

[Emburse] Certify seems to have been designed with large organizations in mind, particularly those with corporate card programs as opposed to "small business" cards. The integration with American Express Business accounts failed after less than a year, and was not reestablished before we pulled the plug on the whole project. Even worse, [Emburse] Certify's support team wasn't able to offer alternatives.

Incentivized

Budget tracking on expenditure by departments - Precoro assists with budget tracking on the total budget which is allocated to each department. If the budget has been exhausted an alert is made for exceptional approval to the budget.

Duplication of invoices. When a supplier bills us the same invoice twice, Precoro makes a notification that an invoice with the same number was already uploaded for payment.

• Customer service/support: They have an incredible team. We are fans of the chat option and 99.9% of the time our issues are solved within a 5-minute window.
• Listening to customers: they are always looking for ways to improve their product. They have free conferences sprinkled around various cities. They are worth trending. They provide "what's new in Certify" as well as round-table discussions specifically addressing how their customers are using the product and what they have learned along the way.
• Keeping their product up to date: Certify takes back various suggestions from the conference to enhance their product. I have been at every conference they have had and have actually seen customer suggestions get implemented into the program.

Incentivized

• Easy tracking of purchase orders with real-time status updates
• 3-way matching of POs, invoices, and receipts to avoid errors
• Built-in commenting to discuss requests and approvals right in the system
• Responsive customer support with live chat — always helpful
• Visual budgeting tools to track spending by department or project
• Product catalog to standardize items across the company
• Mobile-friendly approvals — approve requests from anywhere
• Timely email and in-app notifications to avoid delays
• Easy-to-use interface — no steep learning curve
• Smooth onboarding and quick team adoption

• The ability to add a receipt after a report has been submitted would be helpful. This would simplify processing as opposed to disapproving the report and sending it back to the user for correction and re-submission.
• Though not a fault of Certify, our users drive multiple destinations every day, rather than occasional trips from city A to city B. Therefore, capturing mileage is a time-consuming process for our users.

Incentivized

• The "bundles" in Precoro are not actually bundles. I would like to connect 2 of our catalog items together so that when 1 is selected for purchasing, the other item is required
• Sometimes the comments wont properly tag a person that we're trying to tag
• More options to customize the approval workflow based on location
• Ability to edit where we're buying an item from without having to deny the request

Incentivized

I am very used to Certify's components. But some users that I manage still have a hard time fixing their expense reports no matter how many times I try to teach them. The Editing expense Report and Adding Expense Report option sometimes gets confusing and causes some employees to enter transactions twice. There should be a better layout to make it easier for them to edit and finish their expense reports. I try to teach Certify as much as I can, but the usability should be a bit easier so it is less confusing.

Incentivized

At first glance it seemed to be rather difficult in use, but actually it turned out to be much easier [than] we thought. Thanks to the Precoro team we could go through the procurement workflow. Now with [the] right, user-friendly software partner, we are absolutely ready to meet all [our] company's needs.

The measure of support is how well they respond when you really need them, like when the system is not performing correctly. We have been on the platform less than a year, and there have been at least 2 instances, where the platform was down. The 2nd time was the day before out fiscal year end. And they need a development website. When they are making changes to your LIVE instance, and things go wrong, the client is the first to know about it! I've come to understand that Certify has tiers of support. Those in tier 1, barely know more about the software than the users. I sent a request for a report that shows expense reports currently pending approval and after 5 days of back and forth I was told to build it myself.

Incentivized

Precoro is a company, which makes great products for businesses. What is more, it is a team of professionals, who are always keep[ing] in touch with you. Thanks [to] Precoro, we easily go through procurement workflow and manage all of our POs in a couple of minutes. We had a great experience with the Precoro team which helped us with installation of the software.

We used Concur prior to Certify. It cost 5x as much and was not worth the money. We also looked at Expensify, which had minor issues compared to what we are dealing with in Certify. Certify does not compare to Concur. The platforms are in two different leagues. Expensify is a good comparison and it is compatible with major ERPs like Sage Intacct. Nexonia, is actually also an Emburse product and likely would have been a better fit given it's integration capabilities with Sage Intacct.

Incentivized

Precoro is unique because it can be customizable from start to finish without needing to build in API. It is extremely easy to use and understand, so we did not need to give our employees extensive training as we did with Tradogram. Precoro also allowed us to communicate about orders right within the order itself, where the other software did not.

Incentivized

• We have reduced the amount of time our operations department has to spend booking flights to 0.
• Hotel bookings have been greatly streamlined and we are looking to eliminate human interaction with this process once CC authorisations are handled.
• We have eliminated the wait time between operational travel research and client approval time -- it can all be handled in one single step now.

Incentivized

• Our problem before implementing Precoro was a lot of manual tasks, from managing catalogs to creating reports. Now all related processes are in one place, and it's faster to create a purchase order, track it, and get products in time. Also, the overall visibility increased. We can see all purchases and their impacts on our budget. Reports is the most customizable module, so we can get the data we need. Thanks to our CSM for fast onboarding and help!