Bento for Business vs. Emburse Abacus

Our organization runs a lot of short-term or one-off programs where the program staff need to buy supplies -- Bento is perfect for these scenarios. The staff who make the purchases are not staff who would typically have a company card, so we wanted a solution other than giving them a credit card. Bento was perfect because it makes the purchasing & bookkeeping processes for these programs easy and efficient for both the staff and the finance team

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Track expenses by employee
• Restrict purchases based on amount and category
• Import transactions directly into QuickBooks

Incentivized

• 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)

Incentivized

• easier way for employees to access their statements without setting them up as admins
• monthly statements generated by card
• monthly fee needs to be added to one of the card statements

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If you are looking for prepaid business care or a business expense card, I highly do not recommend using Bento for Business. Do yourself and your business a favor and use a more customer service orientated services such as Pex, Wex, or Expensify. Bento for Business is bad business. Just don't do it.

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.

Incentivized

• Saving time by eliminating reimbursements
• Allowing many staff to have a card to make purchases without worrying about financial control/risk of too many people having a company card
• Efficiently synchs with Quickbooks

Incentivized

• 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.