Brightflag, with offices in New York, Ireland, and Australia, offers their flagship legal billing application, emphasizing spend management and advanced analytics.
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Emburse Abacus
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Abacus is a web and mobile application that helps manage employee expenses and reimbursements. Some key features include: Real-Time Expense Submission, Integrated ACH Payments, and Dynamic Custom Reporting.
Abacus was acquired by Certify in summer 2018 and is now part of Emburse, formed from the merger of Certify and Chrome River March 2019.
I already recommend Brightflag to anyone and everyone who processes invoices. There is a lot of information and data that comes on these invoices, and having a system that streamlines the information in one place has been extremely useful for a department that is a cost center and needs a quick way to justify every spend.
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.
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)
Super easy to set up and use. The interface is intuitive, but it's worth spending some time getting used to seeing where the different "file cabinets" are located. I recommend having one person dedicated to the day-to-day management of the platform (separate from the reviewers and approvers), someone who just manages to upload the invoices, setting up new vendors, liaising with BF Support, but cross-training everyone who uses it on the broad functions.
Customer support is spectacular. Probably the single best quality of this product. They are quick to respond, quick to troubleshoot, and quick to offer suggestions on workarounds for things that might still be in the works (or unique to us). That level of agility and can-do attitude is what I needed in a partner like this.
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.
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.
ROI has been superb: saw a 30% drop in legal spend (based on invoice amount) due to catching items that shouldn't have been charged or charges that exceeded agreed-upon caps.
Being able to add prior years' invoices to the system has been incredible since it allows for internal benchmarking and YoY comparison reporting.
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.
