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
Emptoris
Score 5.5 out of 10
N/A
N/A
$59
Per User Per Month
SAP CLM, discontinued
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
SAP CLM (formerly CallidusCloud CLM) was a contract lifecycle solution which has been superseded as SAP's CLM offering by SAP Ariba Contract Management.
I would say there are positives and negatives to all. Emptoris seemed to be more advanced in progression of their tool. Others seem to have created a tool to meet a customers need and was not part of their core business model or competency.
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.
If you have a highly bureaucratic organization that is heavily focused on procurement, Emptoris can provide some value. It seemed to be very good at linking the contract information to procurement for better spend control. If you are trying to implement a standalone contract management solution that allows you to easily create contracts and store them in a central location, this isn't the tool for you. There doesn't appear to be a simplified implementation. In general, when a SaaS solution has a complicated and expensive implementation, I am very skeptical. This does not show that the vendor is trying to move customers forward on a single code base. If that many things need to be done during implementation, you are starting to customize the solution for every customer. This hurts the vendor's ability to scale and make improvements in the future.
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)
Document protection - the Check Out contract feature is a great way to allow external parties to make modifications to contract language without the ability to accept those changes. Those redlines can then be imported back into Emptoris and reviewed or further modified as needed.
Notifications & reminders - you can trigger an email manually from within the system, or you can configure automated notifications andreminders to alert users when a new task is received or has aged a given amount of days, etc.
Interview wizard - there is a lot of value in the interview wizard. Administrators can configure screens with selecting options via check boxes, radio buttons, or typed-in values. Variables and conditions can be used to selectively populate fields within the contract or apply other options, making for a quick and convenient method to generate contracts conforming to corporate standards.
Field customization - administrators can customize a list of options for various fields including contract substatus, address type, and user created business term variables.
Approvals - many different options are available to configure approvals to trigger automatically upon presenting and/or executing the contract including specific individuals, one or more approver groups, or based upon various criteria including terms within the contract, type of contract, or the contract's owning organization.
Reporting, Emptoris comes with standard reports which can not always can be fit into our business. This needs to be improved. I hope Emptoris is addressing this issue in their latest releases.
Though the feature of editing language in MS word is excellent, loading MS word takes time.
There are a lot of new, exciting products coming out in every field and I believe that there is always something better right over the horizon. If it was my choice, I would review my usage of Emptoris and other software periodically to make sure I'm using the most efficient software possible.
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.
The above rating for the overall support from Emptoris is for their product / product support, roll out training and refresher training / ongoing training, which is not only good but superior. There is no major or reconizable bad review that can be given to Emptoris at this point in time, from where is stands.
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.
I am a fan of Ariba to be used for the entire lifecycle of Sourcing. From RFX's to cutting PO's. I feel Emptoris misses the boat on the idea of a "One Stop Shop" for all of your Sourcing/Purchasing needs
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.
We won the 2005 Baseline Magazine Award for best ROI related to a technology implementation with an ROI 5544% (see 2005 Baseline ROI Awards, GlaxoSmithkline).
We always felt we could do "two times the work, with half the people and deliver double the savings".
