Likelihood to Recommend Emburse Abacus is well suited for mid-market organizations that are open to - or embrace - the concept of real-time processing of expense transactions. Emburse Abacus takes a radically different approach from other platforms that rely on modeling paper-based monthly (or periodic) expense reports containing multiple expenses submitted simultaneously. Emburse Abacus allows each transaction to be very rapidly processed individually so that approving managers and accounting professionals are able to perform review tasks and identify potential problems throughout the entire month, relieving the massive monthly influx of large numbers of expense reports simultaneously.
Read full review Certify is not well suited for multi-dimensional ERPs. Although Certify 'offers' general ledger dimensions GLD, the use of them is extremely limited. Filtering on any GLD can only be done once. There is not the possibility for creating hierarchies with the dimensions. The only method of exporting is via a flat file or the open API, which I understand is quite limited. This software is for a smaller scaled business that is not trying to track across dimensions or create hierarchies. Data flow is one directional. I cannot emphasize enough the shortcomings of the reporting. The parameters are mostly based on expense dates rather than expense reports. There are entirely too many of them, and some of them perform the function!
Read full review Pros User-Friendly Interface: Reviews from our employees (ages ranging from 20s-70s) are all positive in regards to the ease of submitting an expense and getting reimbursement on Abacus Timely Reimbursement: After final approval, money hits user accounts within 2 days Approval routing: ability to set up multi-tier complex approval routes Syncs with Sage Intacct: pushes entries on a day to day basis in to Intacct and it hits our GL accordingly Abacus is competitively priced compared to the competition Abacus utilizes "by expense" management. Getting rid of expense reports and batch reports (they do have an option where you can batch if need be) Read full review 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. Read full review Cons When you upload a receipt to abacus it would be great to port in the information from the receipt to the text fields. It would be good to have a more automated way for Abacus to integrate in with other payroll systems. It would be nice to have more levels of permissions, e.g. manager level, administer level and employee level. Read full review Reporting: I would like to see more chart availability from the program. We include various data points from Certify in our monthly financial statement package. Currently, we export data from the program and create our own pivot tables to create charts. Dashboard feature: It would be nice to be able to use the data for a specific date and then be able to print that information. Can't think of another one. As stated before, they listen to their customers so prior issues have been addressed and implemented. Read full review Usability If the integrations with our card programs had succeeded, I expect [Emburse] Certify would have worked well for expense submitters and approvers. During the short time that the American Express Business integration was active, transactions flowed smoothly, and the expense reporting and receipt matching functions were quite good. The [Emburse] Certify mobile app was particularly powerful and easy to use.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I chose Abacus because of its ease of use and flexible billing. The billing is based on the number of submissions rather than users in the system. Because we reimburse committee members, we have a lot of users in the system, but the activity can vary widely from month to month.
Read full review Before Certify, there was only manual expense reports entered for our company. This took too much time for employees too finish and caused a delay of efficiency. With Certify, it is easier to access and finish each report with the right amount of effectiveness and efficiency it needs. Certify is really helpful in saving a lot of time for employees that do not have time.
Read full review Return on Investment It is giving reliable services. I am happy with its user-friendly services. Since I have issued the virtual and physical cards, I am getting real-time, and end-to-end control over my employee expenses. They can now easily go to visits and this has built their trust too. Further through receipts and expense details, I can easily control the pre-set budgets and easily configure rules to control spending. I will also like to praise their customer care team they are very helpful and always ready to assist. Read full review The organization and automatic flow of the expense report to approvers and then AP saves time for all. The user has agreed that it is easier and quicker to prepare the expense report and the managers and AP department finds the automated process to be quicker and more efficient. Time saved is money saved. Certify can recognize if a duplicate expense is submitted or if an expense is submitted too late to be reimbursed according to our policies. This prevents us from reimbursing an expense in error. We use a customized report to track a specific type of expense that gets submitted by our sales team. There is a limit on what can be spent on specific expenses that fall into an entertainment category and the report helps us to stay within the limits. Previously, without this tool, we had spent so much more time manually tracking these expenses and had gone over the limits, creating a deficiency in our processes. Read full review ScreenShots Emburse Abacus Screenshots Emburse Certify Screenshots