Coupa vs. Emburse Certify

Suitable: Simple indirect procurement. Low cost; short cycle implementation. Less Suitable: Complex procurement scenario requiring serious vendor collaboration. End-to-end integration. Direct Material Procurement, especially when planning, quality inspection, and other miscellaneous activities are involved, requires handling various special statuses and updates to meet industry- or country-specific requirements.

Incentivized

[Emburse] Certify seems to have been designed with large organizations in mind, particularly those with corporate card programs as opposed to "small business" cards. The integration with American Express Business accounts failed after less than a year, and was not reestablished before we pulled the plug on the whole project. Even worse, [Emburse] Certify's support team wasn't able to offer alternatives.

Incentivized

• A consistent format is helpful because if you learn the tool once, then you should be set for long term success.
• Straightforward with some of the fields (not all), but for some pieces of work. It is easy enough due to the direct nature of the tool.

Incentivized

• Customer service/support: They have an incredible team. We are fans of the chat option and 99.9% of the time our issues are solved within a 5-minute window.
• Listening to customers: they are always looking for ways to improve their product. They have free conferences sprinkled around various cities. They are worth trending. They provide "what's new in Certify" as well as round-table discussions specifically addressing how their customers are using the product and what they have learned along the way.
• Keeping their product up to date: Certify takes back various suggestions from the conference to enhance their product. I have been at every conference they have had and have actually seen customer suggestions get implemented into the program.

Incentivized

• With one particular customer I have had about 40 emails to be accepted as a vendor. With other customers before Coupa became horrendous I had no problems. As an existing Coupa user why do I have to create a new profile?
• I have been accepted as a user 3 times then a day later Coupa wants the same form filled again and again.
• Help is only on a chat line. You cannot speak to anyone and in my opinion they are not helpful. Their suggstions have gotten me nowhere. They refer me to talk with my customer to straighten out the problem. My cusotmer doesn't have a clue.
• I'm considering not to accept purchase orders that require invoicing through Coupa.

• The ability to add a receipt after a report has been submitted would be helpful. This would simplify processing as opposed to disapproving the report and sending it back to the user for correction and re-submission.
• Though not a fault of Certify, our users drive multiple destinations every day, rather than occasional trips from city A to city B. Therefore, capturing mileage is a time-consuming process for our users.

Incentivized

I love using coupa but i'm not the decision maker in this regard.

Incentivized

-Could be easy or hard to use depending on corporate policies and compliance. At times, errors and cryptical message associated with them could drive users mad.

Incentivized

I am very used to Certify's components. But some users that I manage still have a hard time fixing their expense reports no matter how many times I try to teach them. The Editing expense Report and Adding Expense Report option sometimes gets confusing and causes some employees to enter transactions twice. There should be a better layout to make it easier for them to edit and finish their expense reports. I try to teach Certify as much as I can, but the usability should be a bit easier so it is less confusing.

Incentivized

-Support is generally speaking OK (not great). The user community is quite active, and the response time is acceptable. I would certainly hope there's more user-generated content (like in SAP, Oracle, and Linux, etc.), but I suppose Coupa is still not large enough, and the incentives are not yet there.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The employee that trained me was not particularly interesting in teaching me but they were not a Coupa employee.

Incentivized

Coupa fits within our desire to have best of breed systems delivering value to our organization. We generally work with true cloud providers that are available anytime, anywhere for our mobile workforce. We are pleased that Coupa is in our lineup of service solutions.

Incentivized

We used Concur prior to Certify. It cost 5x as much and was not worth the money. We also looked at Expensify, which had minor issues compared to what we are dealing with in Certify. Certify does not compare to Concur. The platforms are in two different leagues. Expensify is a good comparison and it is compatible with major ERPs like Sage Intacct. Nexonia, is actually also an Emburse product and likely would have been a better fit given it's integration capabilities with Sage Intacct.

Incentivized

• The Sourcing Module has returned our investment 23 times on an annualized basis.
• We're now SOX compliant and as a public company, that's keeping us compliant with our corporate charter.
• Having one central invoicing location has reduced our AP calls significantly. Our suppliers now have visibility into where their invoice is in the payment cycle. We also have a much higher invoice-to-pay cycle.

Incentivized

• We have reduced the amount of time our operations department has to spend booking flights to 0.
• Hotel bookings have been greatly streamlined and we are looking to eliminate human interaction with this process once CC authorisations are handled.
• We have eliminated the wait time between operational travel research and client approval time -- it can all be handled in one single step now.

Incentivized