#1 most frequent
United States of America
78.9%254 installations of 322
What is Emburse Certify?
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.
Categories & Use Cases
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Screenshot of Certify Homepage - User interface for all users that includes a quick view of their expenses, pending expense reports and approval requests.
Top Performing Features
Payment Status Tracking
Tracks what stage payments are at in the process, from approval to receipt.
Category average: 8.3
Customizable Approval Policies
Policies for different types of approvals can be customized, sent to multiple approvers, automatically approved, etc.
Category average: 8
Financial Document Management
Invoices, expense reports, and associated documents are stored within the platform for any future needs.
Category average: 8.3
Areas for Improvement
Corporate Card Reconciliation
Allows companies to reconcile employee expenses with company card statements.
Category average: 8.3
Advanced OCR
Automatically imports information from invoices, receipts, expense reports, and other scanned documents into the platform.
Category average: 7.8
Payment Audit Trail
Allows admin users visibility into the entire payment process, from receiving the expense claim or invoice to the payee receiving payment.
Category average: 8.4
Who Buys & Uses Emburse Certify
#2 most frequent
Canada
4.3%14 installations of 322
#3 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
4.3%14 installations of 322
Huge time saver and easy to use.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
All employees have the app installed on their phones in order to upload receipts for credit card purchases.
Pros
- Easy uploads
- Drop down categories
- No need to save and carry receipts around
Cons
- Sometimes all the information is not populated and total amounts are incorrect
- I have to go online to fix receipts that do not merge with the report
Return on Investment
- Quicker processing time for in house employee
- Quicker processing/delivery time for our 3rd party accounting firm
- Everyone is accountable for making sure all entries are correct
Usability
Other Software Used
Bluebeam, Procore
Emburse Certify for the win!!!
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Emburse Certify is the tool our organization uses for expensing receipts for business use. Our finance team create a report each month and we are able to upload our receipts and state the reason for the purchase. This is completely automatically. There is also a great app that allows us to upload our receipts as soon as we make a purchase which prevents the employee from misplacing the receipts.
Pros
- Keep a record of expenses
- outlines the expense
- easy upload of receipts
Cons
- N/A, The feature is easy to use and user-friendly
Return on Investment
- Easy to manage expense reports
- Set up for reminders for employees
Alternatives Considered
SAP Concur
Other Software Used
Paycor, Workvivo, Microsoft Teams
Emburse Certify Review
Pros
- Tracks for duplicate receipts - Based on receipt date and amount, Certify will flag duplicate receipts and with a click drill down to the report it has matched to duplicate to.
- Split Expenses - The split expense function is easy to use and understand. Certify allows for multiple splits by amount or percentage.
- Report Executive - Allows for the automatic building of expense reports based on a predetermined time.
- Credit Cards - Merge receipts option. This option will merge together receipts and expense lines based on date and amount.
Cons
- Unsophisticated - This platform is too simple for a system anymore robust than QuickBooks.
- Reporting - There are over 50 reports in the system and not one of them will yield a report showing "current expense reports awaiting approval". The Custom Report Builder is limited in scope. Once a report is written, it is stifled by preset parameters.
- Navigation - There is not a "Save" button anywhere in the platform. "Return" is not a universal term for "Save". It's clunky to use. Navigational icons change meanings depending upon how/when they are used. When creating a report, that entering a receipt date range is mandatory, is a complete waste of time and useless.
- Wizards - Throughout the software "wizards" are referred to as the list of red colored instructions one encounters upon having left out needed information. A wizard is not a list instructions. It is a guided set of instructions that lead to the correct result.
- Support - The first tier of support in Certify is not knowledgeable of the software. Our system has been put into chaos on more than one occasion due support having not something correctly. There is no obvious way to call them. They don't even have people in chat anymore. It's a stupid bot.
Return on Investment
- Certify has eliminated the double data entry we were doing, but any platform we chose would have accomplished that.
- Due to the limited reporting functionality, Certify has not been helpful as an expense management reporting tool.
Other Software Used
Sage Intacct, DocuSign
Usability
Powerful software, if it worked the way it was supposed to
Pros
- Mobile app is very good, particularly at matching receipts with expenses
- Web-based desktop interface is user-friendly
- Automated expense reports are attractive for busy managers
Cons
- After-sales support is terrible
- Not all credit card programs are supported
- Integration with other programs is complicated
Return on Investment
- Overall initial cost was lower than many competitors
- Amount of configuration and testing time required from internal implementation team was difficult to manage
- Failure of the implementation resulted in additional costs, and confusion when trying to undo configurations and integrations
Alternatives Considered
Concur Travel and Expense and Paycom
Other Software Used
Ceridian Dayforce, Microsoft Dynamics SL, Comcast Business VOIP (VoiceEdge)
Usability
Certify is Certifiably great!
Pros
- Integration with Amtrav or other travel booking systems. Certify has a tight integration with travel systems that makes it feel nearly like one cohesive tool.
- Easy expense options. Use OCR on receipts, import from credit cards and merge items, approve and inquire about expenses. Track your submissions.
- Easy UI. Friendly and easy to navigate without getting lost.
Cons
- Mobile app. The mobile app is basically a web view of the mobile version of the page and isn't native. That experience could be much smoother.
- Certify hasn't implemented SSO completely according to the SAML 2.0 protocol, so which IdP workflows work, SP is still broken. This makes it harder to take action from a link in an email as you always need to use the IdP workflow specifically.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Concur Expense
Other Software Used
AmTrav, BetterCloud, Google Voice
