Airbase headquartered in San Francisco offers a cloud-based accounts payable and spend management solution, and combines a pre-approval system with corporate cards, allowing users to manage the entire AP spend process in one place.
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Emburse Certify
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Certify is travel and expense management software developed by the company of the same name in Maine, which merged with Chrome River in 2019 to form Emburse.
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Pricing
Airbase
Emburse Certify
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Airbase
Emburse Certify
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$8 Expense report
Additional Details
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Certify AP has volume based pricing based on processed invoices
Airbase is suitable for companies that don't have very many legal entities. The features for multi-entity companies are inefficient, often requiring the user to look at only one entity at a time. That, coupled with requiring the company to prefund money into an Airbase account in order to use a physical corporate card or virtual card can be burdensome. Prefunding requires that you maintain cash in Airbase in order for the credit cards to be used, which in reality, is more like a debit card. And when using multiple entities, you have to have money in separate accounts. Therefore, you have to constantly monitor if you're balances are sufficient. There is a feature to auto load funds when the balance reaches a certain threshold, however, the loading of funds takes 5 business days. It was almost impossible to predict at what point wallet loads needed to be initiated, and therefore required a significant sum of cash to sit in Airbase accounts. There were instances where significant costs would come up, and our employees were unable to pay for them because the cash ran too low before the wallet load was completed.
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!
Uploading receipts is seamless and easy! I hardly ever have issues with this and the doc reader seems to work very well.
Being able to see who needs to approve my reimbursement requests and adding notes/comments to reach out for questions or bump them as a reminder is a great feature.
Email notifications are helpful and timely of knowing when an approver has approved my reports.
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.
The Airbase Invoice date syncs with the accounting system's current month date if the previous month is closed.
Split expenses and attendees' departmental expense recording. We are currently collaborating with Airbase for a different look and applicability of this functionality.
More filters to be added into the report creation and export.
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.
Airbase is a great solution, especially for smaller companies without an ERP that has an AP module. If an ERP was implemented, Airbase would be less valuable.
See previous comments about some UI/UX features that can be improved: - Can't see full merchant name or approver in the desktop "Reimbursements" screen - Can't see or filter expenses by "Purpose" as a user - Receipt mgmt and submission in app could be less clunky
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.
Over the last 3 years, we've only had one major service issue that rendered Airbase unusable for us for about 24 hours. That said, they navigated the SVB bank crisis very well and made sure funds were available during that time.
The customer support offered by Airbase has been top-notch; we could not have asked for anything more. They were accommodating during the onboarding process. They have always been quick to respond to any issue that we have faced. We get the sense that they are well-run and organized company.
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.
The Airbase team was very helpful in importing our .csv files from our previous system. They provided a great overview of the system for the rest of the company and everyone got up to speed quickly.
We chose Airbase for the virtual cards and cashback. Having complete control over our software spending via virtual cards was important to us for several reasons, including security, audit, budgetary, etc. We knew it had functions for expenses and bill payments, so we thought we would switch to them, but we were slow to do so. We would have switched sooner if we had known how good these functions were and that they were better than their counterparts.
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.
It is very scalable among different departments in one company. We have not tried to use it yet with multiple entities so I cannot speak to that experience.
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.
