Emburse Certify vs. Paycom

[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

As I mentioned, the onboarding process is incredibly easy. We have around 300 employees and are constantly hiring, so Paycom has been a huge help. In fact, the ATS functionality was a major factor in our decision to switch to Paycom.

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

• Paycom does a particularly good job of updating and taking in information. We have a rep named Alex Cisco, who I hear from two or three times a month. He’ll just want to drop by and say, “Hey, how’s the product working? Is there anything I can do to help you with the product? And by the way, do you know about this new feature?” If I have feedback, I give it to Alex, and if he doesn’t know how to fix it that day, he’ll take it to research and development, and we may see an answer for it a month or two down the road.

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

• One thing that we did come across recently is we were restructuring our organization chart and we did find that in order to update someone's job title, for example, we had to go into two different places, not just the employees page. We had to go into a different function as well and it took up a lot of time.

Incentivized

we are having no problems with how the system works and our support system at paycom is the best - we are learning more and using the system in more ways all the time the only thing that could be better is pricing on some things

Incentivized

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

Because it's very easy to use. It's web-based, and you can use it on your cell phone; you can do everything that you do on your laptop on your cell phone, which is unheard of. I haven't heard of other companies being able to do that.

Incentivized

They are very dependable and I have never experience any outages

Incentivized

Yes load quickly

Incentivized

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

In 6 years, we've never had a bad experience with client support. We implemented during COVID, and I was the only person in HR at the time. I was also having to homeschool our children, which meant bizarre work hours and limited time to focus on platform build at times. There were nights that I was literally on calls at 11 pm and the implementation team was unbelievably supportive. Recently, a Position Seat specialist came on site to help us set up for our 5 client codes - the experience was transformative for how we use the platform and an absolute game changer. I trust Paycom because I trust our representatives. They truly are strategic partners for us, and work to ensure we're maximizing the platform and that our needs are being met

Incentivized

Tadd and Ellie have been great! They have show us many aspects that implementation did not. They are very personable and action oriented as well. Anytime we need them they offer to swing in.

Incentivized

It was good, but hard to know what questions you need to ask until you actually get in there and start working with a live product. But Paycom is also very helpful every time I call and can't figure something out. Nathan has been very friendly and helpful no matter what I call him about. He is always eager to help out.

Incentivized

Not at all satisfied it was a nightmare we spent over 8 months with the implementation team having issues after issues all related to the Puerto Rico regulations (half my employees are in Puerto Rico) and at the end we were moved over from the implementation team to the production team without all the issues being resolved

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

I haven't used a whole lot, but I would say the only other one would be Blackbaud. Where I came from before, we used Blackbaud as our payroll provider, and Paycom is so much more user-friendly. Once we moved to Paycom, and then where I'm at now, we used ADP and also switched. Both companies have been very pleased. Stacking up against those, I would say Paycom meets our needs as an employer for payroll and our benefits platform as well. Even switching our benefits over to Paycom was a big decision for us, and there were some bumps in the road, as there are with any change, but it's always met all of our needs, and we're very happy with it.

Incentivized

They are not able to meet our current needs

Incentivized

• 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

• I would say the impact has been positive. Everything I've needed to do for my job has been available within the system, and if there was ever something I couldn't figure out, I could reach out to customer service, and they would help me. Personally, I haven't had any issues with it.

Incentivized