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
Expensify
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Expensify automates the entire spend management process. Scan receipts, track mileage, submit and approve expenses, manage corporate cards, reimburse employees, pay bills, send invoices, and book travel. Built for individuals and companies of all sizes, anywhere in the world.
$0
per month
Pricing
Emburse Certify
Expensify
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Collect
$5
per month per user
Control
$9
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emburse Certify
Expensify
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$8 Expense report
No setup fee
Additional Details
Certify AP has volume based pricing based on processed invoices
They fail in every aspect to compete with Expensify, or any other program out there. We selected Certify because we were told it could help us and replace our very manual process.
Verified User
Executive
Chose Emburse Certify
We narrowed our selection down to Certify and Expensify. I had our director of IT review both. He was extremely happy with the ease of use as well as the support we would receive through Certify. I believe his initial conversation was with "Mr. Happy. "Certify will know who …
To be honest we haven't even looked at Expensify ever since we switched full time to Certify. At the time when we compared the 2 platforms, Certify came out on top due to its flexibility of use and customer support. Every once in a while an employee brings up a comparison but I …
I believe for a large organization Certify is the least costly provider compared to other solutions. It is significantly better than using the likes of SAP's Concur ERP type platform. However, it is not as forward-thinking and cool to use like Expensify or Zoho. Again, you …
Certify is similar to Expensify in terms of features and overall potential. Expensify, however, works exactly how I expected it to work when I first opened it. There was very little that I had to learn. Certify’s workflow and interface are a little different than I anticipated, …
Originally we selected Certify because of favorable pricing and it met our basic needs. 5 years in we are again evaluating other products seeking direct integration with our accounting system, Intacct and potentially a solution that also offers time tracking.
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!
Expensify has been incredibly useful to me for many years. Considering I am using the free version, it's hard to find a better value! If your company does not have a good expense-capturing system, Expensify will save you hours on submitting reports. You can take a picture and toss the paper receipts right at the point of sale without worrying about losing them during your travels. If you have a small business, you can use it to track and organize regular expenses to make billable expenses and end-of-year taxes a whole lot easier.
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.
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.
Make it easier to submit multiple receipts/files in one expense
Often times I get a warning that the value of a receipt doesn't match what I manually I inputted. So making Smart scanner a little smarter, essentially.
We like using the tool and we receive positive feedback from employees and management who use the tool. It saves time and helps us concentrate on the value adding activities so we are very likely to keep using Expensify in the future
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.
Mobile works great, but let's be honest. It's just a photograph. Their OCR and human turk technology works great to scan that photo and enter the proper information. The web interface is decent and allows you to work with single expenses in great detail. What's missing is the ability to mass update expenses, and this sometimes hurts, especially if you're a heavy user of the system.
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.
Our rep has been amazing. He has built custom reports for us that have been very time consuming and difficult. Our reps are also currently looking into new submission solutions for us that we are excited about. They came up with this and recommended it on their own without me complaining about an issue. They are about our success and are very excited about the product they offer.
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.
Concur was a great product as well but Expensify offers the ability to quickly upload expenses and submit reports just the same. There is no free version with Concur, so for a small business that's interested in keeping costs down I would highly recommend Expensify.
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.
Our organization no longer spends countless hours per month orchestrating the consolidation of data (MS Excel, typically) into our general ledger.
Our accounting department is no longer tasked with making sure the correct individuals have approved submitted reports.
Our accountants have a much easier time coding the reports that have been submitted by users. For the most part, we rely on users to code their submissions to the correct accounts.
