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Emburse Chrome River

Score7.7 out of 10

173 Reviews and Ratings

What is Emburse Chrome River?

Chrome River EXPENSE is expense management software, from Chrome River Technologies in Los Angeles, California.

Media

A consistent experience across any screen size or operating system
Simple, customizable tiles for expense entry
Approve expenses directly from your inbox with a single click

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Top Performing Features

  • Corporate Card Reconciliation

    Allows companies to reconcile employee expenses with company card statements.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Payment Audit Trail

    Allows admin users visibility into the entire payment process, from receiving the expense claim or invoice to the payee receiving payment.

    Category average: 8.6

  • Advanced OCR

    Automatically imports information from invoices, receipts, expense reports, and other scanned documents into the platform.

    Category average: 8.2

Areas for Improvement

  • Electronic Funds Transfer

    Funds can be transferred via EFT as opposed to paper checks.

    Category average: 8.6

  • Financial Document Management

    Invoices, expense reports, and associated documents are stored within the platform for any future needs.

    Category average: 8.6

  • Payment Status Tracking

    Tracks what stage payments are at in the process, from approval to receipt.

    Category average: 8.7

An easy to use tool for reporting expenses

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I submit my monthly expense reports via Chrome River. The program's interface allows me to summarize my expenses, categorize them by type, attach all necessary documentation, and even automatically calculate mileage reimbursements. This generally makes submitting monthly reports much simpler for me, an employee looking for quick and painless reimbursement.

Pros

  • Attaching documents
  • address search for mileage calculation
  • having multiple reports for multiple purposes and easily switching between them

Cons

  • The description fields do not accept all standard punctuation, which means having to rewrite my descriptions of expenses while I try to guess which characters are allowed
  • Distinguishing between the save report vs. submit report function
  • the description fields are too limited, which makes it difficult for my boss to understand my punctuation-less descriptions

Return on Investment

  • It has definitely streamlined the submission and review of expense reports, saving time across all personnel levels
  • It has standardized mileage reporting with a uniform set of addresses
  • It provides a self-referential library for reports, making it easy to standardize reports

Usability

Chrome River Review

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

we use it to do expense reports for any time of purchases and travel, government per diem, and anything spent on our travel card

Pros

  • user friendly
  • has wizards for some items
  • the user face is newer
  • lots of options when it comes to different expenses

Cons

  • the receipt area sometimes matches wrong
  • sometimes expenses come in and are wrongly identified

Return on Investment

  • fast and easy return in expenses
  • faster reimbursements

Usability

Alternatives Considered

SAP Concur

Other Software Used

SAP Concur, Oracle PeopleSoft HCM, Salesforce CMS

Easy Tool for expense and travel management

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Emburse chrome river is used to track expenses to all the projects assigned within the organisation and before this we used to spend lot of time on tracking expenses for different projects and with the help of this, we are able to reduce manual labour by 50% and this also gave insights to the spending patterns across the different teams in our company.

Pros

  • easy to use
  • compliance submission
  • automated routing

Cons

  • Formatting issues in pdf while downloading
  • Sometimes it takes time to load
  • Rule sheets can be improved

Return on Investment

  • It improved efficiency in tracking expenses by 50%
  • reducing manual labour of filling
  • Automation of the report makes the task easy

Usability

Alternatives Considered

SAP Concur, Zoho Expense and Coupa

We had a Time Consuming Manual Process!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our entire organization uses Emburse Chrome River for travel & expense reimbursements for employees, students and non-employees. We also utilize Chrome River's dynamic programming to reconcile our company issued PCards and Non-PO vendor payments. We were looking for a solution to simplify these processes, the tool needed to be flexible, route documents electronically, integrate with our PCard system, and we needed the ability to access the tool from anywhere and at anytime. We needed to solution to our time consuming paper intensive manual process. We were constantly chasing paper from office to office, checking in documents in one office and then checking them out so another office could check them in. We used databases to track where the paper was in the approval process which sometimes left us vulnerable if the person(s) responsible for the database was out unexpectedly.

Pros

  • Completely Configurable when it comes to Messages and Warnings. You decide when and where to fire the message. You decide what the message reads. You can add, remove, and/or edit these messages at any time.
  • Configure warnings and messages to match your company policy and update as often as needed. With a recent enhancement we can now add hyperlinks in our warning messages pointing our users directly to your policy.
  • Use messages and warnings to guide your users so that they can submit a correct and complete report the first time, greatly reducing denials.
  • Easily electronically track documents from submit to approval.

Cons

  • At go, live reporting was lacking. Since our go-live on 12/1/2016, Emburse Chrome River had made significant updates to reporting. Emburse is now moving to a new reporting tool that doesn't appear to have the same robust, user friendly functionality that we have today.
  • Some releases have caused issues on our side. Emburse Chrome River does fix issues caused by releases but it would be helpful if they engaged clients with testing of upcoming enhancements and releases.
  • There is always pain with growth, Emburse Chrome River is no different. As Emburse Chrome River enhances existing features we are sometimes left in the dark until decisions have been made. There are customer advisory boards, those members should be called upon to provide input before going life.

Return on Investment

  • Time is money, we have saved lots of time with Chrome River. 51% of our expense and Non-PO invoice reports were submitted and exported to our ERP system within 5 days of submission.
  • 94% of our expense and Non-PO invoice reports were submitted and exported to our ERP system within 20 days of submission.
  • We have recorded over 900 expense reports being submitted and exported the same day!
  • 89% of our PCard reports were submitted and exported to our ERP system within 10 days.
  • We have seen a 95% reduction in journal entries in our ERP System due to PCard transactions being allocated incorrectly. With messages and warnings, our users get it done right the first time!
  • At the end of our first Fiscal Year End after going to Chrome River we only had 1/10 of 1% of our PCard dollars un-reconciled.

Usability

Other Software Used

Ellucian Banner

Great Software!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Chrome River EXPENSE has made such a difference in how we manager our expense reports. Our employees out in the field are able to timely and efficiently submit reports. They all love the ability to just snap a picture and we love that its drastically cut down on lost receipts! I've used other expense programs before and I prefer Chrome River EXPENSE 10 times over.

Pros

  • OCR [Optical Character Recognition]
  • I love that the platform is the same no matter what device you're on
  • Easy to use, no matter computer skill range

Cons

  • Sometimes the attachments dont load propertly

Return on Investment

  • Quicker corporate card expense report turn around
  • Easier for us to track how employees are spending money

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Concur Travel and Expense