Emburse Abacus vs. OpenAir PSA

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Emburse Abacus
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Abacus is a web and mobile application that helps manage employee expenses and reimbursements. Some key features include: Real-Time Expense Submission, Integrated ACH Payments, and Dynamic Custom Reporting. Abacus was acquired by Certify in summer 2018 and is now part of Emburse, formed from the merger of Certify and Chrome River March 2019.
$9
per active user/per month
OpenAir PSA
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.N/A
Pricing
Emburse AbacusOpenAir PSA
Editions & Modules
Starter
$9
per active user/per month
Professional
Custom Pricing
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emburse AbacusOpenAir PSA
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Emburse AbacusOpenAir PSA
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Emburse AbacusOpenAir PSA
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
Emburse Abacus
-
Ratings
OpenAir PSA
7.3
15 Ratings
3% below category average
Task Management00 Ratings8.015 Ratings
Resource Management00 Ratings7.515 Ratings
Gantt Charts00 Ratings8.09 Ratings
Scheduling00 Ratings6.012 Ratings
Workflow Automation00 Ratings6.09 Ratings
Team Collaboration00 Ratings8.012 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology00 Ratings6.07 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology00 Ratings7.08 Ratings
Document Management00 Ratings8.56 Ratings
Email integration00 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Mobile Access00 Ratings7.512 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking00 Ratings7.014 Ratings
Change request and Case Management00 Ratings8.010 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management00 Ratings7.514 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
Emburse Abacus
-
Ratings
OpenAir PSA
8.6
10 Ratings
15% above category average
Quotes/estimates00 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Invoicing00 Ratings9.07 Ratings
Project & financial reporting00 Ratings8.59 Ratings
Integration with accounting software00 Ratings9.07 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Emburse AbacusOpenAir PSA
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Dext Prepare (with Receipt Bank)
Dext Prepare (with Receipt Bank)
Score 9.1 out of 10
FunctionFox
FunctionFox
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Darwinbox
Darwinbox
Score 8.0 out of 10
SAP Ruum
SAP Ruum
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Webexpenses
Webexpenses
Score 8.4 out of 10
Quickbase
Quickbase
Score 9.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
Emburse AbacusOpenAir PSA
Likelihood to Recommend
2.8
(17 ratings)
8.5
(20 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(7 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(9 ratings)
5.5
(6 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Emburse AbacusOpenAir PSA
Likelihood to Recommend
Emburse
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
NetSuite
This product is well suited for an organization that is focused on client services, project delivery, time tracking, expense reporting, and revenue recognition. From a pure project management perspective, this product is not as feature rich as say Microsoft Project Server. For organizations that are looking for detailed complex project plan and resource management (along with resource leveling, etc.), this is probably not the best suited product
Read full review
Pros
Emburse
  • 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)
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NetSuite
  • Netsuite OpenAir PSA is highly configurable and has a large ecosystem of assets to work with.
  • Tasks are easily designed to automate processes in your business workflow.
  • OpenAir is designed in such a way that it can communicate and receive information from external systems without having to re-engineer your systems to make them work if you are following standard business practice.
Read full review
Cons
Emburse
  • 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
NetSuite
  • Compared to QuickArrow, setting up reports to reflect the data accurately seemed to require a bit more consultant time and collaboration. Getting the numbers correct is essential, so budget extra time for this iniative. We also learned that certain calculations can not be displayed in the executive dashboards. Ask these questions upfront to ensure your dashboards are complete for your needs (again, working backwards in the preparation stages).
  • Compared to QuickArrow, NetSuite OpenAir PSA falls short in the resource management capabilities. UI, flexibility, and scheduling options all could be improved. This is on their roadmap, timeline yet to be defined. Scheduling is vitally important to our company and this is THE area where we feel is the applications weakest. However, the application does provide everything critical to scheduling and provided the elements we needed in order to be successful. We altered our scheduling process accordingly.
  • During our System Administration 3 day online training, when a question was asked about detailed functionality, sometimes the trainer would share..."Yes, OpenAir has a configuration for that. Just inquire with your consultant and they can flip that flag in your instance." The responsibility for obtaining these special application configurations was placed on the System Admin [in training] to ask and to take notes. If your company needs the application to work a certain way, speak up and ask your OA consultant. There seems to be MANY flags that can be flipped in the background to allow for the system to meet your needs. My complaint is that these are not published, rather made available if one inquires.
  • OpenAir is able to generate invoices directly and we strongly encourage using this feature to keep everything housed under one application. However, this did not work for our organization and we leveraged a financial integration. A bit of a pioneer integrating with Softrax -- the integration works well, however is quite fragile. We do receive appropriate support when needed, but would prefer the integration to be a bit more stable. We recommend integrating with their stated supported financial systems, as staying the course will likely net a more stable integration.
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Likelihood to Renew
Emburse
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
It all depends. We are still looking at moving our consultants to Oracle PAC, in order to get our financial systems in line (we use Oracle Financials currently). We are feeling a lot of pain with integration and segmented systems.

Ultimately,it depends on how much pain is felt there. OpenAir has given us a path to follow on from QuickArrow. I foresee either moving onto Oracle PAC by end of calendar, or staying on OpenAir.

OpenAir to Oracle integration is not easy. From a reporting and process perspective, there’s been pain from being in different systems
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Usability
Emburse
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.
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Reliability and Availability
Emburse
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
The system up time was reliable and that was never anything we ever had any concerns/issues with.
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Performance
Emburse
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.
Read full review
Support Rating
Emburse
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
NetSuite
As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.
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In-Person Training
Emburse
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
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Online Training
Emburse
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them
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Implementation Rating
Emburse
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that
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Alternatives Considered
Emburse
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
NetSuite
OpenAir accurately reflects changes in real-time as well as lends itself to see where a draw is at, when payment is expected and what percentage of the contract has been billed or approved to date. This helps with project billing and tracking as well as cash flow. Quickbooks lacks the ability to show progress draws, approved changes, and pending changes on a given project where OpenAir excels.
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Scalability
Emburse
No answers on this topic
NetSuite
Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Emburse
  • 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
NetSuite
  • It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
  • Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
  • It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Emburse Abacus Screenshots

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