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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Ramp
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Ramp is a corporate card and spend management solution that helps companies of all sizes to accelerate growth without compromising on their finances. Boasting best in class user experience and a direct integration with the user's accounting solutions, the vendor states Ramp helps finance teams save 1-2 days a week tracking expenses, following up with employees, and closing their books. With Ramp, companies have real time visibility into spending, automated expense reporting, and advanced…
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Pricing
Emburse Certify
Ramp
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emburse Certify
Ramp
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
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!
Ramp is great if you want to automate your expenses process. Ramp immediately responds when I (or someone on my behalf) make(s) purchase and I can easily pass receipts and notes live. No more searching for "stuff"!! I spend more time on my job and not worrying about chasing things down or forgetting what was purchased. I charge, I send notes, and I'm done. It's so easy!!! It's incredibly helpful to be able to instantly spin up a virtual card for employees on the go or who have planned expenses. It gets you away from a delayed reimbursement to remote employees and having expenses coded by the employees shortly after they make their purchases.
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.
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.
The system does not allow you to sort on all columns in some of the areas (not consistent from one screen to another).
When bills are entered in as a Bill Pay, the expense doesn't show up in a csv file until it is paid but it needs to be expensed in the system as the date of the Invoice.
If a vendor is paid through a credit card transaction as well as Bill Pay, you have to look at two different places in the system to see the details.
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.
We moved to Ramp from Expensify at our accountant's advice. We went with her advice due to ease of use, ease of Quickbooks sync, ability to send reminders with one click, and more. We are very happy with the decision to switch to Ramp.
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.
The actual dollar savings is difficult to determine at this point. We'll have a better idea the ROI at the end of the year. Previously, we received 1% back on all purchases with our corporate card. We receive 1.5% with Ramp, pay per number of cards annually (for Ramp Plus) to auto-lock cards and for additional features.
Time savings for admin and employees has been significant due to ease of use.
