BILL is an online service for SMBs which provides a central dashboard for managing Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and cash flow management. It syncs with all major accounting systems like QuickBooks, Sage, Intaact, and NetSuite.
$45
per month
Emburse Certify
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
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.
N/A
Pricing
BILL
Emburse Certify
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$45
per user/per month
Team
$55
per user/per month
Corporate
$79
per user/per month
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BILL
Emburse Certify
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$8 Expense report
Additional Details
—
Certify AP has volume based pricing based on processed invoices
Bill.com allows for multiple approval chains and dollar limits. Generally not needed in a small organization, but very important in a larger organization.
It depends, Bill.com certainly has a strong reputation and I agree it can be a great solution in the right scenario but I think the implementation and initial setup are critical and need to be well thought out based on the setup of the organization you are a part of.
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!
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.
Currently, our company uses a different platform to submit expenses, we only use bill.com to receive them. So perhaps this isn't actually a place where bill.com could improve, but the expense submission process may not have been robust enough for our company.
The bill.com platform wasn't the most beautiful or pleasing to use, but this is a minor fault.
I'd love a way to set up recurring payments (e.g., my phone bill is reimbursed each month).
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.
While our firm does not use Bill.com internally, we know many customers that use Bill.com and are very happy with it. Based on the feedback from current users, I would say that the product should have a strong renewal forecast. Once customers move their AP to the cloud, they would be unlikely to move it back given a choice.
Bill.com continues to raise the bar with new features and improved interface. The Fast Pay option is another innovation that reduces administrative time when you have to get an overnight check out. The new Chat Support interface, powered by Zopim, which is world-class, adds to the responsiveness of Bill.com's support team and makes getting real-time answers that much easier.
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.
The only time Bill.com was ever "unavailable" was then the Sync to Quickbooks function failed. That happened a time or two but was usually quickly remedied. I'm not sure if that's an issue with newer online versions of Quickbooks Enterprise -- at the time we were using a remotely hosted Quickbooks instance accessed via terminal server (vs a cloud offering like Bill.com is)
I could not explain to them how I was trying to remove an old email account from my company page while granting the new email account access to the bank account that the first email account had added. The "set a bank account as inactive" button is labeled delete, but they don't seem to recognize that. I requested my Bill.com account be deleted on Wednesday so I could start all over with a fresh account; this seemed to be completed Wednesday night, but when I tried to create a new Bill.com account from the same email, it took me to my old bill.com account.
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 online training provided by Bill.com is concise and since the firm consistently improves the platform functionality, users are able to select the training for the modules they specifically need.
top solution out there to simplify accounting and finance tracking. Only negative note: they started charging for every single client ACH payment done through Quickbooks. Originally this feature was free, but then it grew to up to $10 per transaction. Reason for which we had to look into alternate solutions
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.
After receiving an offer to 'finance' outstanding invoices, I was enticed by the promise of a 3% total cost for a 60-day period, with the possibility of extending the financing for an additional 10 months (for an additional fee). Eager to access funds, I decided to finance an invoice worth $17,160.00. Within 24 hours, BILL deposited $16,645.20 (97% of the invoice amount) into my account.
However, when the customer paid their $17,160 invoice four days later, instead of the funds being deposited into my checking account as I expected, BILL chose to retire the loan and retain my $514.80 fee for the 4 day advance period. This unexpected turn of events resulted in an effective interest rate of a staggering 273.75%. It was clear that this arrangement was far from what I had initially understood, and the financial impact was outrageously high.
Frustratingly, my attempts to resolve this issue through customer service were in vain, as I spoke with three agents who provided no satisfactory solutions. To anyone contemplating using BILL's services, I strongly urge you to carefully scrutinize the fine print and consider opting for a more reputable finance company."
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.
