Item: Emburse Chrome River
Rating: 10
Author: Ben Adams

Overall Satisfaction with Chrome River EXPENSE

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Chrome River Expense is being used by employees at our 10 manufacturing plants, 4 distribution centers, and corporate headquarters in the United States and Canada. The software easily allows employees to create their expense reports and have the expenses compared to pre-set limits and other parameters for improved expense controls and compliance and then electronically routed to the appropriate expense approvers.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Creating expense reports is fairly intuitive, which minimized training during implementation.
Chrome River easily routes expense reports to multiple approvers whenever there are charges on a report that have cost centers with different approvers.

Cons

In a couple of instances, Chrome River was having non-systemwide functionality issues and they could have proactively communicated better the status of the issue and the estimated resolution time.

Return on Investment

Implementing Chrome River resulted in an almost 50% savings compared to Concur.
Implementing Chrome River allowed us to add a new credit card that provides an annual cashback rebate of around 1.5%.

Usability

The administrators and most users feel that Chrome River is very intuitive, which minimized the training needed during implementation. The few issues we encountered were because the users either did not or could not read and follow simple instructions.

Alternatives Considered

Concur Travel and Expense

Compared to the previous provider, Concur Travel and Expense, Chrome River Expense is more flexible with configuration and more intuitive, and regardless of the device you use: laptop, tablet, or mobile phone, you access the same software engine, so the underlying technology and software are consistent. The only difference is how the various screens or tabs appear so as to maximize visibility and usability depending on screen size.

Support Rating

Customer Support for Chrome River is very good. The only instances we felt it could have been better was when they were experiencing system issues that did not affect all clients. For example, when there was a problem processing MasterCard feeds with only those clients who used MasterCard, we feel Chrome River could have been more proactive with communication regarding the status of the issue and the estimated time for resolution.

Likelihood to Recommend

For organizations that are interested in saving money, we experienced an approximately 50% reduction in costs compared to our previous provider, Concur. This savings was an unexpected result of switching credit card providers to one with an annual cashback feature. When we tried to implement the new credit card provider with Concur, we were told they couldn't support that change, so we looked for another provider and selected Chrome River Expense. Also, Chrome River is well suited for large organizations with multiple operating locations.

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