Emburse Chrome River vs. MIP Fund Accounting

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Emburse Chrome River
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Chrome River EXPENSE is expense management software, from Chrome River Technologies in Los Angeles, California.N/A
MIP Fund Accounting
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
MIP Fund Accounting™ is a configurable fund accounting solution. The solution includes functionality for fund accounting, procurement, budgeting, payroll, human resources, timekeeping, fixed asset management, grant management, and dashboards for nonprofits and government agencies.N/A
Pricing
Emburse Chrome RiverMIP Fund Accounting
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emburse Chrome RiverMIP Fund Accounting
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsWe offer three cost-effective, subscription-based pricing models: A transaction-based model, priced according to expense report volume A submitter-based model, priced according to an average number of monthly submitters An enterprise-level model that includes unlimited expense reports. Pricing for this model is based on total employee headcount Feel free to contact us to discuss the best one for your organization.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Emburse Chrome RiverMIP Fund Accounting
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Emburse Chrome RiverMIP Fund Accounting
Expense Management
Comparison of Expense Management features of Product A and Product B
Emburse Chrome River
8.8
3 Ratings
9% above category average
MIP Fund Accounting
-
Ratings
Employee Expense Reporting8.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Corporate Card Reconciliation9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Payment Management
Comparison of Payment Management features of Product A and Product B
Emburse Chrome River
8.0
3 Ratings
0% below category average
MIP Fund Accounting
-
Ratings
Customizable Approval Policies8.33 Ratings00 Ratings
Financial Document Management5.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Payment Status Tracking9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Payment Audit Trail9.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Duplicate Bill Detection8.33 Ratings00 Ratings
Advanced OCR8.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Electronic Funds Transfer8.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Emburse Chrome RiverMIP Fund Accounting
Small Businesses
Dext Prepare (with Receipt Bank)
Dext Prepare (with Receipt Bank)
Score 9.1 out of 10
QuickBooks Desktop Pro
QuickBooks Desktop Pro
Score 8.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
BILL Spend & Expense
BILL Spend & Expense
Score 8.8 out of 10
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Webexpenses
Webexpenses
Score 8.5 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Emburse Chrome RiverMIP Fund Accounting
Likelihood to Recommend
7.5
(123 ratings)
8.8
(430 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.3
(18 ratings)
9.2
(126 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(107 ratings)
8.1
(100 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.8
(15 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.5
(86 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(113 ratings)
7.8
(99 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(9 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.3
(7 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(7 ratings)
6.4
(28 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.6
(8 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.0
(1 ratings)
7.8
(13 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.7
(15 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.4
(13 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.1
(13 ratings)
User Testimonials
Emburse Chrome RiverMIP Fund Accounting
Likelihood to Recommend
Emburse
The Emburse Chrome River is well suited for tracking expenses and reimbursement. The compliance part of the software makes the task very easy to ensure all the reports that are being used within the company are updated and easy to verify. The Automating invoice processing makes some redundant task easy to execute.
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Community Brands
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!
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Pros
Emburse
  • [Emburse] Chrome River listens to its customer's needs and does its best to match current products to those needs, or collaborate internally to determine if an enhancement can be made available that will not only benefit that customer, but will be a good use case for all Chrome River customers.
  • The [Emburse] Chrome River customer service team is great. Unlike most companies, you can speak to a liver person!
  • [Emburse] Chrome River's training offerings are relevant and pertinent to the day to day operations of the software.
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Community Brands
  • 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
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Cons
Emburse
  • Would be great to have pre-saved templates available to apply to line items at the expense report header level rather than having to go into each line.
  • Would be nice to have a mass upload functionality for things like cost codes, allocations, and credit card users.
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Community Brands
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Emburse
Chrome River is easy to use. We needed little training for our users and instead pointed them to Chrome River's Help Guides which are clearly written and easy to understand. With tools SNAP and the ability to email receipts means we can be completely remote when submitting reports.
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Community Brands
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.
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Usability
Emburse
I would rate Chrome River Expense a 10 because, as I mentioned before, it is very simple and easy to use. This is important from an administrative point-of-view as well as for the field employee. Being a general contractor, it makes it all the better for our employees to use a program that is easy to understand and requires little time and effort. It has made tracking expenses very simple and has been well received by the entire company.
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Community Brands
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
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Reliability and Availability
Emburse
The software is always running effectively. I use many Cloud based systems and never had issues with Chrome River
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Community Brands
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.
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Performance
Emburse
System runs normal pretty much all the time. Does not slow any other systems down.
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Community Brands
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.
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Support Rating
Emburse
This has been easy for me because we have a rep that contacts the supporters for this product to correct any issues we may have with the software or changes needed to help out employees use Chrome River easier. This from my understanding has been a hit or miss kind of interaction with our rep and Chrome River.
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Community Brands
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.
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In-Person Training
Emburse
No answers on this topic
Community Brands
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.
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Online Training
Emburse
The software is very user friendly, so the online training was easy to pickup for everyone.
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Community Brands
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.
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Implementation Rating
Emburse
Before implementation begins, make sure you have a plan on how you would like your workflow and platform setup for a system like Chrome River. It will speed the process and eliminate the need to make changes when you go live.
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Community Brands
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Emburse
It's the [industry-leading] software for Enterprise level organizations with [large-scale] teams and financial responsibilities. The software has the most robust set of tools and pays for itself with the amount of time it saves. Many newer alternatives have sprouted up but I don't know that we would ever trust another software to do our Expense Tracking and Management.
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Community Brands
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.
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Scalability
Emburse
It's very easy software to design to your needs.
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Community Brands
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.
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Return on Investment
Emburse
  • We have seen a return on approver time of nearly 60% meaning our approvers have tripled their output.
  • We have had feedback from our users that time spent creating expenses has gone from an average of 2 hours to perhaps 20 minutes, tops.
  • We have seen in our dashboards that the Emburse Certify Suite of tools has returned an average savings of over $500K a year.
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Community Brands
  • 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.
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ScreenShots

Emburse Chrome River Screenshots

Screenshot of A consistent experience across any screen size or operating systemScreenshot of Simple, customizable tiles for expense entryScreenshot of Approve expenses directly from your inbox with a single click

MIP Fund Accounting Screenshots

Screenshot of MIP Advance™ Dashboards with drilldownScreenshot of MIP™ Transactions WorkflowScreenshot of MIP DashboardsScreenshot of MIP DashboardsScreenshot of MIP Dashboard drilldownScreenshot of MIP Transactions