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UNCA Chrome River EXPENSE Reveiw
Updated November 12, 2021

UNCA Chrome River EXPENSE Reveiw

Catherine Mallon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Emburse Chrome River

Chrome River EXPENSE is being used across our organization to support our faculty, staff, students, and visitors in their travel reimbursements and vendor payments. We have been able to reduce paper processing by 90% and have continued to be a front-runner in the academic world for automated expense reimbursements. It has changed how we do business and how effectively we support our community.
  • Electronic approval routing
  • Exporting/importing data to and front our ERP system
  • Customer support
  • Compliance policy rule coding
  • Resetting of partially applied pre-approvals.
  • Easy dollar adjusting for reimbursement based on final approvals from the travel acct.
  • Ability for travelers to make adjustments when a report has been returned.
  • We have reduced our paper expense by more than 90%.
  • We have been able to reduce the TIME that it takes to review expense reports from a manual review of 5-10 days down to 1-2 days. Major benefit.
  • We now have the ability to issue payment within a few days of an approved expense report versus 2 weeks to a month prior to Chrome River.
  • The impact of Chrome River has also been the driving force that has enabled us to concentrate on other processes that we otherwise did not have the time to look at.
Chrome River Expense was not as easy as expected during the time we configured and setup but that was only due to the 2 systems running together (Mercury and Platinum). Since that time when all processes have been moved to Mercury, it has become increasingly easy to make adjustments to our routing rules, policy adjustments, and even just small changes within the system to meet our specific needs like adding an activity code to track all COVID19 expenses.
We have been hugely impacted by the ability to integrate with our current ERP system. The most impressive outcome is the ability to have the actual payment data imported back into Chrome River so that the user is able to see exactly when their reimbursement check (or direct deposit) was issued and for how much. Our IT department appreciates the simplicity which is required to set up exporting data.
Our motto has always been to "not complicate" and to "keep it easy for the user". Chrome River gives us the ability to get the detailed data that we need in order to process expenses yet still keep the entry of the expense very user-friendly and less time restrictive for the traveler.
We actually saw a presentation from Chrome River at a finance conference that was given some years back and were instantly drawn to them due to the overall look of their pages. The deciding factor was that they were already partnered with our current ERP provider. The support that they could provide was presented at the conference which was the start of our "discovery mode" in signing up with Chrome River.
Chrome River support has always been very effective. The ability to have an automated "helpdesk" provides a very impressive tool to not only create help tickets but to also track those requests and look back at those for additional help with they are solved. Chrome River provides quick response times and utilizes their "categorization" modes to be sure that you are receiving help from the correct department.
Having a system that is programmed specifically around your organization's processes and policies is extremely important today and Chrome River provides that. If you are really trying to automate processes, especially in this time of high percentage teleworking, Chrome River can knock this item out of the park. They provide a system that can be accessed on a cell phone, iPad, or laptop. In other words, you can take your expenses and approvals everywhere with you and not worry about missing a deadline.

Using Emburse Chrome River

500 - Each of the individuals that use Emburse/Chrome River are either faculty, staff, students or Athletes. The are from various areas and represent many different functions - all of which relate to Higher Ed travel. Each of the users are directly impacted by the software platform and are 100% engaged in its mobile funcationality.
3 - The individuals that currently supports Emburse Chrome River in-house have different skills yet similar. 1 Business Systems individual that was instrumental in the discovery prior to implementation as well as the configuration; 1 IT individual that provides the program writing for the different feeds that occur to and from Emburse Chrome River to our current Ellucian Banner system; 1 individual who provides all of the Administation, Accounting, Auditing, Training and Troubleshooting of Emburse Chrome River who has a varied background in software analytics.
  • Paperless Platform
  • Automated Expense Management
  • Automated Reimbursement
  • Automated Direct Payments to Vendors
  • Automated Credit Card Reconciliation
  • Travel Advances for Teams
  • Non-employee Travel for Candidates, Speakers, Guest and Board of Trustee Meetings
  • Virtual Meetings/Conferences
  • Addition of Purchase Card Reconciliation
  • Vendor Invoicing and Payment
We have spent years in the old paper artwork methodology of expense report creating and submission. Once we began to automate to a paperless system 5 years ago, there would be no way we would go backwards. Our savings in time managements has been well worth the relationship.