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 If they are using foreign exchange I always use Xero. If I need reporting to be customized we always use Xero. If the client is already working in a software and it is working for them we will leave them in the software they are in.
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 Their method of moving between screens was very logical and intuitive which is not a "given" attribute among software packages. Finding transactions was relatively easy with just common sense. The use of this software was generally well received in that the accountants did not discredit the software as cheap, poorly organized, or timely to learn. No one at Corporate had a vendetta against using Xero. It does a good job of allowing the users to drill down to the final detail of an account balance - which is fundamental to the accounting department's needs. 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 Occasionally, the price increases and I feel that prices should be fixed for long-term users as there are very few changes in the software from when I started using it 6 years ago. It would be useful to have the emails sent with invoices saved. Visual dashboards are limited. Read full review Likelihood to Renew In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
Sarang Mandke Consultant - Cloud accounting integration, Real Time Accounting
Read full review Usability Xero has all the features that you need, basically. From chart of accounts, reconciling books, to making annual financial reports. What I'm currently looking for Xero right now is to provide more broader integration with the other apps so we can use it for customer-facing experience also. All in all, everything works well!
Read full review Reliability and Availability We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
Read full review Performance Pages generally load quickly, but it's a fairly common occurrence to have pages taking a bit longer than I'd like to load (as in, 4+ seconds). Occasionally I have to refresh a page to get it to work. Bank feed and integrations tend to be slow in general, but that could easily be due to API latency on the side of the other parties. Most of the time, though, the bank feeds refresh before I login so it's not a huge problem. Not necessarily good performance compared to a local app like QuickBooks desktop, but definitely good performance for a cloud application. Room for growth? yes.
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 Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
Read full review In-Person Training The format was great; someone was there to ask questions or help if you were stuck.
Read full review Online Training All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
Read full review Implementation Rating If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
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 I've used a lot of different accounting systems. Many of them so big and powerful, but a hassle to get set up. Xero is light, inexpensive, and easy to use. When I originally selected them they seemed like they were developing new features at a quick rate as well. I was invited to be part of focus sessions to make the product better. That part has slowed down significantly though.
Read full review Scalability I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
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 Saved many hours through automatic invoices and followups Saved many hours by allowing transactions to start via bank feeds (ie I don't have to input a transaction and mark it against what is in the bank/cc account; rather, the transaction in the account is where you input the transaction into the books. Has the scalability my business requires, and not much more. Read full review ScreenShots Emburse Abacus Screenshots