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Expense Management for the Modern Age
February 21, 2017

Expense Management for the Modern Age

Jesse Rudolph | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Chrome River EXPENSE

Chrome River Expense is being used firm-wide as a complete replacement to an old in-house developed solution that was based off of an MS Access database. Expense has allowed our firm to speed up processing of expense reports, better track how we spend and more accurately and efficiently get expenses charged to clients, as applicable. The integration with our accounting database is nearly seamless which has all but erased the need to rekey anything.
  • Snap and send (via email) receipt functionality.
  • Integration with accounting system, including image integration.
  • Firm compliance rules and approval routing.
  • Clunky ad hoc reporting, a more robust and faster reporting tool would be nice.
  • Phone app is not very useful, use the snap and send (via email) function instead.
  • Our firm was able to reassign the equivalent of 1.5 FTE, allowing us to have a ROI of less than a year.
  • As our firm grows, our AP team doesn't have to because Chrome River is scalable and increased usage can easily be absorbed by existing staff.
Being in the law industry, Chrome River is a must. Our firm looked at other vendors including Aderant Experts' AP module and ADP's expense and invoice options however we found that Chrome River offered the most features/functions at the best costs compared to some of their biggest rivals in the law space. A lot of the features and functions that Chrome River has built into their system for year, such as the rules engine, is starting to be mimicked with other vendors but Chrome River maintains the lead with a more mature product offering that is constantly being improved upon.

Chrome River Expense is built with the modern business traveler in mind. Having the ability to snap and send images of receipts while on the road is incredibly useful, especially for those that have an assistant who can then start building an expense report before you return to the office to grant a final approval.

The robust rules engine allows for everything from simple to multilayered approval routing which can allow all required individuals to review staff expenses and the fact that it can be tracked by the end user help reduce extra calls to Accounting asking where something is or when it will be paid.

The biggest downside is that for firms going from having nothing to having such a robust system (even though the system is fairly intuitive) training and handholding for the first 6 months is a must for most staff.

Using Chrome River EXPENSE

700 - Expense is used by all staff in various ways. Our attorneys will submit expense reports, primarily for items that are client billable and passed through to our billing systems. Our paralegals, assistants and staff (including administrators) will submit requests for inter-office travel and for any qualified continuing education opportunities.
5 - In house support consists wholly of the Accounts Payable team. All training was done on the job and for day to day activities does not require extensive technological skills. Two of these five also work with Chrome River on any additional rules or configurations that may be requested to meet firm requirements as they come up. This work is done directly with Chrome River's support/configuration team through their help desk and consists. The person that makes these requests needs to be able to clearly outline a need, test the configurations in a test environment, clearly explain any issues found in testing and then coordinate the updates into a production environment when tests have passed.
  • Streamline Expense Management
  • Back up is attached and retained forever within Chrome River
  • Integration with main accounting database systems
  • Using rules and compliance messages to alert users when they are over budget on certain expenses.
  • Using pre-approvals for large expenditures
  • Firm credit card expense integration
Anyone looking for a modern Expense Management system should consider Chrome River. Aside from the modern and slick GUI, the underlying system is so configurable it is hard to find processes they cant replace. If the process can be done manually, more than likely Chrome River can automate it and make life easier for both the front and back office staff.