Emburse Certify vs. OpenAir PSA vs. Zoho Projects

[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

I would only recommend OpenAir if you are a company of 100+ with complex business processes and have a need to integrate into multiple external systems. I think most project managers find it cumbersome and irritating until they are trained on what not to use. It needs a more simplistic obvious approach rather than having every feature exposed all at once.

Incentivized

My work involves projects of 5-15 people with numerous projects running simultaneously. Prior to Zoho, I did not have a central location from which to view all project statuses at once. Zoho looks to provide this and also looks like it will deliver. I am anxious to see how our organization's use of it develops. At this time, I feel I am likely to recommend Zoho Projects because my organization has made great software decisions in the past so I have a level of trust already that the research has been done that Zoho is the best solution for our line of work.

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

• We had a specific process down pat with QuickArrow and wanted similar functionality. It gave us that and more.
• It has a lot more reporting functionality than QuickArrow. There are hundreds of options for layout, what is reported, etc. I haven’t played too much with those reports yet. We more or less just replicated reports I had in QuickArrow. We needed the professional services/transition team at NetSuite to help me. There are too many options at this point. I imagine we won’t use all of those reports. Quick Arrow had a lot less.
• Mobile Capabilities – There wasn’t a mobile concept for QuickArrow. OpenAir has been beneficial for iPhone users for time sheet submissions. There is no app for Droid users yet. There are not a lot of users out there, who really know how to use it yet. Managers are not using the app for dashboards/reporting, etc. The field has been pretty quiet but they do really like the mobile app feature. They like not having to go to laptop to enter their time. That’s all we require of them – just time entry. We ran into some glitches - some of the time sheets submitted via iPhone did not get to the tool itself. That happened in one instance. I made QA aware of it. I am not sure what the resolution turned out to be.

• Swiss Army Knife: The suite of Zoho projects can be tailored to fit the needs of any business. It's great to have a bunch of different software offerings that will work together seamlessly.
• Task Customization: Zoho allows you to customize your tasks more than other platforms (add start dates, due dates, dependencies, subtasks...)

Incentivized

• 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

• The UI of many parts of the system is really poorly designed. Inputting and updating forecasts is a very time-consuming and difficult process for our PMs and it doesn't allow any type of upload from a spreadsheet (which might be easiest in absence of a decent UI).
• I have extensive experience with the reporting piece of OA and have a list of notes and improvements. The entire module is very inflexible at least pieces of it are not intuitive. Easy example: If you create a custom calc with a filter on Project Type to only include hours from our customer projects (Impl and MS), but then create a report with a filter to only show hours from MS, that custom calc won't work properly. The filter logic is unable to handle multiple filters on the same field.
• Specific example of a ticket we've filed but not heard back on: When you close a project, any remaining forecasts from that project remain active and show as "committed hours" against those individuals which doesn't make sense on projects that are closed. Why would you not give an option to delete any remaining forecasts when closing a project as default behavior?

Incentivized

• More flexibility on making the user interface more compact (like Excel or MSP). Current interface is well spaced, but some users may like a more compact view.
• More simplified Gantt Charts that help us understand progress and dependencies.
• Ability to export projects to Excel for sharing with others we can't/don't want to bring on to Zoho projects

Incentivized

We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.

Zoho has been able to fit the needs of our Engineering organization. The employees and management that are using it have not found a 'catastrophic' reason to discontinue use. Although certain features and better support mechanisms would be much better, it has been able to keep with both basic needs and more advanced ones. A majority of the company has enjoyed the basic interface it offers, the apps it has for iPhone and Blackberry, the mobility of updating a project without needing to be connected to any type of server. There are still improvements that can be made in future releases but as the person who originally purchased the solution for our company, I have found it to be an excellently priced solution in the functionality it offers.

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

In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.

Incentivized

Zoho Projects is an easy project management tool to use. It provides all the functionality that we required for handling projects. We can easily create personal forms for projects and tasks, allowing us to add and report on our own desire. Apart from this we can create and edit documents in real time which saves our time. This allows us to share text docs, presentations, tables with the whole team and we can work on them together

Incentivized

We have not had any outages.

Has not been down to my knowledge.

The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.

Speed meets my expectations.

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

As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.

Incentivized

Although it might lack intuitiveness, once you get a hang of how Zoho Projects works, you can do a LOT. The impact good project management has on profitability is huge, and it has helped not only improve communication and coordination when working on a project, but more importantly have adequate tracking of time, due dates and potential bottle necks

Incentivized

Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.

We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them

It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that

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

It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the disparate systems (Salesforce.com for CRM, MS Project Server for Project Management, and MS Dynamics for finance).

Incentivized

Zoho Projects provides a more limited set of functionality and customization options than other task/bug trackers on the market, but what it lacks in functionality it makes up for in ease of use. It probably has 80-90% of the features of its competitors but takes about a third of the time to get up and running and realizing value.

Incentivized

Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.

• 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

• It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
• Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
• It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.

Incentivized

• Unfortunately, prior to creating Project Task Templates we'd occasionally miss a step and something that was necessary would be overlooked.
• The creation of the Project Templates was a team collaborative effort to make sure that everyone had some input as different people was integral to specific projects.
• It took a little while to learn some of the more tricked out features like task dependency but even starting out with the most basic of features was very significant.

Incentivized