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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Negotiatus
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Negotiatus is purchasing software from the company of the same name in New York, that aims to transform the way business administrators and users place orders, control spend, and submit payment across their vendors. The platform is built for the entire purchasing process, and is designed to provide a consistent experience from sourcing through payment across every vendor and website.
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Pricing
Emburse Certify
Negotiatus
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emburse Certify
Negotiatus
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!
Negotiatus is well suited for multi-location--many locations doing the same thing, such as a franchise model. However, if you really want to have tight control on costing, the reporting is not robust enough that, with scale, it would make more sense to bring this in house and create your own vendor relationships
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.
Consolidated invoicing--Negotiatus consolidates all invoices into one monthly invoice for us to pay by the 15th of the subsequent month.
General ledger mapping--products on the platform can be mapped to one or more entities or cost centers through a monthly consolidated file, which has great value when it comes to process efficiency.
Ease of use--the platform is fairly easy for both users and administrators. With many locations that are geographically dispersed, it allows us to manage purchasing without an excess training need.
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.
Communicating Savings: Negotiatus sells itself on its vendor network--the ability to search for the best possible price according to what is available. However, it is challenging to tell what that savings would have been (e.g., WB Mason vs. Amazon).
Speed of Resolution: it sometimes takes a few months to come to a resolution when it comes to analysis/reporting. As they do not have great reporting around savings, we often ask for them to provide some periodic analysis. The account manager will put in the request, but it may not get completed or be up to the appropriate standard due to lack of understanding of the requirements.
Cancelled Orders: at some points early on (2+ years ago), many of the orders were cancelled and we were left scrambling to replace them. That has gotten much better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
