Certify is travel and expense management software developed by the company of the same name in Maine, which merged with Chrome River in 2019 to form Emburse.
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Ramp
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Ramp is a corporate card and spend management solution that helps companies of all sizes to accelerate growth without compromising on their finances. With a direct integration with the user's accounting solutions, Ramp helps finance teams save time tracking expenses, following up with employees, and closing their books. Ramp offers companies real time visibility into spending, automated expense reporting, and advanced insights into ways to cut spend.
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Pricing
Emburse Certify
Ramp
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emburse Certify
Ramp
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$8 Expense report
No setup fee
Additional Details
Certify AP has volume based pricing based on processed invoices
Ramp provides a free tier for smaller teams who want to simplify finances. A step-up to our free tier is Ramp Plus, starting at $15/month/user along with platform fees based on team size. Then, for large businesses, the Enterprise plan requires a custom quote.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Emburse Certify
Ramp
Features
Emburse Certify
Ramp
Expense Management
Comparison of Expense Management features of Product A and Product B
Emburse Certify
7.6
Ratings
12% below category average
Ramp
-
Ratings
Employee Expense Reporting
8.10 Ratings
00 Ratings
Corporate Card Reconciliation
7.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Payment Management
Comparison of Payment Management features of Product A and Product B
[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.
Ramp is well suited for managing everyday spending. We have been able to set standard permissions across the board for our team, monitor spending easily, and adjust "allowances" accordingly and quickly. The instant funding once a request is approved makes it so much faster to make a purchase, if outside of the set parameters. Ramp travel offerings are sometimes unattractive, and we have found many flights, hotels, and car rentals by going to other platforms or the suppliers directly. Pricing is comparable, but many times it is cheaper to book outside of Ramp.
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.
Ramp syncs to Sage Intacct smoothly, pulling dimensions in directly from the ERP.
Coding rules within Ramp are easy to customize, allowing for logic-based options following the path of the GL. This use of smartlists for dimensions dramatically lowers the instances of human data entry error.
Approval routing rules are easy to create and change as the business changes. Approvals can be based on either the user or the coding of an individual transaction depending on your business needs.
The out-of-office delegation function allows the approval process to continue without delays when key personnel are away on vacation.
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.
Even more integration to have us spend less time on reporting expenses for grant reports
This does not happen often, but if you make a purchase and then cancel it with the vendor, for some reason, Ramp does not immediately recognize that purchase cancellation and will continue to remind you to submit a receipt or tag it as an accidental charge, but there is no option to tag it as a canceled purchase.
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.
For the most part, Ramp has been a massive benefit to our organization. It has an easy user experience, looks good on the screen, has intuitive workflows in most applications, and other than issues with accounting, coding & syncing I receive very little feedback (which is positive for us) on using Ramp.
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.
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.
These solutions were all great in their own ways. The two main reasons we chose Ramp was because of their innovation around AI. They have implemented AI Agents in their tool to help enforce the company expense policy and help managers be more efficient in reviewing and approving their direct report expenses. Also, we are able to manage all of our company's international entities on one platform
Ramp has definitely helped us save hundreds of dollars in just the first year of using it. Expenses can easily get lost in the shuffle that is fraudulent or placed on the wrong credit card, but with Ramp, the admin team can see everyone's spend and make call-outs to charges that don't look to be the accurate way in advance of it possibly getting lost and forgotten down the line.
