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.
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Lola.com
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Lola.com, from Lola Travel Company headquartered in Boston, is a travel management platform featuring employee travel points and other rewards, travel spend tracking and management, generate travel itineraries and receipts, and other features.
$250
per month
Pricing
Emburse Certify
Lola.com
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
All-In
$250
per month
Free
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emburse Certify
Lola.com
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
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
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!
We are currently in the process of planning our company wide retreat in which we need at least 69 people to book their flights. While with that many people traveling at once, I do suspect I'll get some questions and have to assist some folks however by using Lola.com, the time I would have spent prior will be cut drastically. And I'll be able to see who is taking what flight and obtain departure and arrival information without much interruption to anyone's day. Prior to Lola.com this task would have been something truly daunting, but not this time!
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.
Provides corporate leadership with great insights into employee travel costs BEFORE they hit corporate credit cards, thereby facilitating better budgeting, planning, and cash flow management
Offers employees who travel a single interface for booking travel
Provides employees who are traveling with concierge level service when booking and while on the road
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.
Room for existing features to grow and expand, especially on the administrative side
Visually-speaking, the overall layout and color scheme used within the site, specifically when it comes to placement and contrast of key text info, has led to some confusion at times
Need for more support of existing travel rewards accounts
This is just my guess as I'm not involved in the decision aside from providing feedback on using Lola. I think, from what I've heard, that everyone likes Lola and we'll renew the usage. I say this because we're an all-remote company and this greatly solves the logistics of booking flights for everyone.
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.
Lola is simple and straight to the point in regards to usability. I didn't have to figure things out and felt that the interface was intuitive. I loved it.
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.
Lola's customer support is fantastic. They have frequently contacted us when there are travel alerts, or anticipated flight cancellations to re-book us before it was too late. They are always helpful and pleasant and we have never had any issues.
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.
Lola.com is much easier to use in terms of UX. Very little Admin and/or user training is needed to get up and running with Lola.com -- which increases our ability to quickly scale the solution. However, I would say that Concur is able to do more inside the travel arena with the addition of expense tracking.
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.
They have made travel cheaper, so that is a direct reflection to our customers and to us.
Customer Service just makes the stress of travel on our employees not so bad. Knowing we have someone to stand behind us while we travel goes a long way
