Emburse Certify

Score6.6 out of 10

101 Reviews and Ratings

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

Media

Screenshot of Certify Homepage - User interface for all users that includes a quick view of their expenses, pending expense reports and approval requests.

Screenshot of Certify Mobile - Snap photos of receipts on the go and upload them instantly to your virtual Certify Wallet.

Screenshot of Certify Travel - Now, corporate travel is even easier. Introducing Certify Travel, your end-to-end corporate travel solution to simplify bookings for employees while helping your company manage travel practices and costs. All for one low monthly fee and no booking fees! Certify Travel is easy to use, yet it is also a powerful enhancement to your company’s expense management system.

Screenshot of Certify Reporting & Analytics

Screenshot of Certify AP- manage cashflow with accounts payable automation

Screenshot of Certify AP- streamlining employee purchasing

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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.

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

Corporate Card Reconciliation
Allows companies to reconcile employee expenses with company card statements.
Category average: 8.2
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

Verified User

Administrative Assistant in Corporate (11-50 employees employees)

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

Tyrunsi Price

Benefit Administrator in Human Resources at Volunteers of America Mid-States (501-1000 employees employees)

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

Carla Lottie

Accounts Payable Manager in Finance and Accounting at Liberty Fund Inc (11-50 employees employees)

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

Enrique Abello View profile

Vice President, Human Resources & Administration in Human Resources at SageWater (201-500 employees employees)

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

Tristan Dobbs View profile

Vice President of Shared Services in Professional Services at Cloudbakers (51-200 employees employees)

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

Emburse Certify

What is Emburse Certify?

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Key Features

Top Performing Features

Payment Status Tracking

Customizable Approval Policies

Financial Document Management

Areas for Improvement

Corporate Card Reconciliation

Advanced OCR

Payment Audit Trail

Reviews

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