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.
$9
per active user/per month
Emburse Tallie
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Tallie is an expense reporting tool that integrates with other billing or accounting platforms (e.g. bill.com, Quickbooks, etc.) to present an expense management solution. It was supported by Certify since the 2017 merger with that company and Nexonia under the new company Certify Travel and Expense, and is now from Emburse, the company formed from the merger of Certify and Chrome River Technologies in March 2019.
N/A
Xero
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
Emburse Abacus
Emburse Tallie
Xero
Editions & Modules
Starter
$9
per active user/per month
Professional
Custom Pricing
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emburse Abacus
Emburse Tallie
Xero
Free Trial
Yes
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
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.
Tallie is great for companies or outsourced accounting teams who are heavily involved with helping users upload receipts or code changes to the correct G/L Account groups or dimensions. Tallie allows for you to set up specific Expense options that are easier for users to chose what charges are for that are mapped to G/L Account groups in the background which allows for more accurate accounting. However, if your accounting books are using other dimensions like departments or projects the more complex the set up the more help a user might need, so it's nice how easy it is to drop into an account to help finish the more complex coding for users prior to them being submitted for approval.
I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.
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)
Seamless integration with Bill.com. While this will not specifically benefit every user, our organization was able to quickly marry the two tools and provide timely reimbursements to employees.
Customer support -- they're available via so many mediums: user training, email, phone, support case reference numbers. If you need assistance, whether an end-user or administrator, you can get it.
In-app camera with intelligent image analysis to extrapolate the vendor name, date of the transaction, amount. It also offers the ability to import a photo from your mobile gallery, and then perform the analysis.
Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.
Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.
In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
Certainly not as robust as bigger products/names on the market, but the features/solution it offers do extremely well, with a good mobile app experience and a nice, clean interface. It helped our organization (7 locations) go paperless, which rapidly improved our expense capture and timeliness in reporting and also gave our staff a better, user-friendly expense report and reimbursement process.
As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.
We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
On a good day, things worked but after upgrades, things began to slow and or not work at all at times. I coined the moving circle while I waited as the "Xero Wheel of Death". Sometimes it never stopped and force quitting was necessary.
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.
As a user of Tallie, I have never needed any support to use it. It is simple, logical and needs no training to use. As a company, I don't think we need any ongoing support but I believe the setup process, which they guided us through a year ago went well.
Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
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.
Tallie stacks up well to Concur. In terms of ease of use, Tallie wins by a landslide. However, when it comes to deeper functionality and integrations into other systems within the business, Concur definitely wins there. So, Tallie is easier for more simple purposes, while Tallie works for more complex organizations.
Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.
I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
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.
Tallie allows my finance team to spend so much less time on expense reports. After a large event, we would have 20 employees submitting reimbursements taking many hours of their time. This has cut out that time.
Tallie allows me to spend a total of fifteen minutes updating records in a report for reimbursement compared to the two hours I used to spend on our archaic system.
Tallie allows direct deposit into your account 2-3 days after your report is approved compared to the weeks it used to take to receive reimbursement.
Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.
