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 I do like the check register, it is easy to access. It is also easy to access information for bank reconciliations but some entries are difficult and I have had ongoing issues with duplicated entries. Those situations coming at times when I am not really sure how I have duplicated an entry and they are somewhat intimidating. It is also somewhat difficult to delete or void erroneous entries or those that need to be otherwise corrected. I do understand that it is accounting software, but feel again that it could be a little bit more user friendly, at least from a fairly "new" user's standpoint!
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 General Ledger processing, including journal entries and reports Ability to download all reports directly to Excel and PDF formats Use of Grant codes to enable grant reporting by month/quarter/year Ability to have multiple departments and consolidate into groups for reporting Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable cannot be out of balance Multiple ways to use the product including Cloud and Classic options, Visual menu or Standard (Top of screen) menus to select processes, many options we are not using in our simple organization 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 With the payroll process, if there is an error in sending the stubs through email, there is no option to resend without a restore. That really needs to change. Being able to void encumbrance at the same time as a PO would be an incredible time saver. When processing W2 the system deletes info. Read full review Likelihood to Renew My company is pretty dug into our current day-to-day systems that serve our operations (ServTracker, Kantime,
MicroMD ). Without MIP Fund Accounting, we would have no choice but to figure out a way to consolidate those three accounting/operations programs into (ideally) one program, which is basically impossible if we want to salvage any historical data. MIP Fund Accounting is a great hub to bring all those pieces together in a palatable form.
Read full review Usability I have used this system for about 12 years now and I still learning how to use it. It always surprises me how there is another report to learn to achieve my data reporting goals. It is great to have a system that you have used long enough to feel comfortable with but also a system that allows you to learn new ways to report and enter data into the system
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have rarely encountered any issues accessing MIP Fund Accounting over the years. On the rare occasions when availability was interrupted, the reasons were always found in-house when using the on-premises version. Since we have migrated to the MIP cloud, we have had no issues with availability. Any maintenance or updates are always communicated to us and are usually done outside of business hours.
Read full review Performance This software is really good as you can run reports for various funds by Revenue Code or Grant code to capture all the data you need for specific revenue streams. Like I said before, this software is amazing for the tracking of grants if you set up your chart of accounts up correctly.
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 I have not reached out to MIP for technical support; however, their website offers great help resources so I can solve an issue on my own. Another team member reached out to MIP for support and was helped quickly. The transition process took longer than expected due to a lag in communication.
Read full review In-Person Training There are no specifics on what happens if you make one choice or another to know which is the best selection. This is true for JVs and AP. In training we were not given specifics of what happens when one possibility is selected over another.
Read full review Online Training Denise O'Malley provided training for the HR module when we added it to our system. Denise also gave us a demo of the EWS module which we were able to see that it would not meet our needs. She was very kind about and understanding regarding the functions we needed with a time clock system.
Read full review Implementation Rating Don't waste your time with MIP. There are plenty of other softwares out there that will do the job better. Do your homework. Get references from actual users. Make sure that what you choose will truly integrate. Make sure that there is local support. Get training. You will be glad that you passed this one by. Trust me.
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 The HRA used RealPage (I'm not sure if it is actually the one listed above), and it did not work well. I'm not sure if it wasn't set up well, designed for larger property management companies, or just not good software, but it did not suit our needs at all. We chose a different property management software and MIP for our accounting. We used Quickbooks for Heartland Lakes, but as our business is expanding and we needed a better true fund accounting software, we chose
AccuFund to start with, but it was difficult to get set up how we needed. We did not trust the information we were getting out of it, and it wasn't easily customizable to what we needed. We canceled that software and chose MIP.
Read full review Scalability The flexibility to create certain features are helpful and are designed to be easier on MIP Accounting Cloud. It has been easier than the MIP Accounting classic version. I may have not fully utilized the software to deploy across multiple departments other than generating revenue reports or expenses. As well as developing budget worksheets for our departments. Which are great as it is, but have not gone farther than that.
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 MIP has allowed us to break down our costs even further to be able to improve our use of funding. I'm looking forward to streamlining our accounting processes even further as I learn more about the possibilities with MIP. As we fundraise for specific projects, we are able to track income and expenses by project to give our donors true numbers on how the money was used. Read full review ScreenShots Emburse Abacus Screenshots MIP Fund Accounting Screenshots