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Chrome River EXPENSE Helps Business Flow
Updated March 23, 2021

Chrome River EXPENSE Helps Business Flow

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Emburse Chrome River

Chrome River EXPENSE is being used by our whole organization to reconcile purchasing card transactions and process reimbursements. It helps address the problem of passing papers around for approval. Electronic approvals make for quick approvals or fast returns for corrections without the report spending days in intra-campus mail. The compliance warnings also help educate our end users on policies and procedures that they may have forgotten about.
  • Easy to use and understand for end users
  • Allows for a lot of customization to work for your company.
  • Analytics make it easy to run reports on almost any aspect of the system such as expenses and compliance warnings.
  • Our Information Technology Department had to do a lot to send/receive feeds from/to Chrome River to our ERP system.
  • Our implementation team had to use our knowledge of Chrome River to come up with ideas of how to accomplish workarounds or specific things and then ask Chrome River if it could be done instead of Chrome River coming up with ideas after we said what we wanted.
  • The majority of our compliance rules were put in by Chrome River as Custom instead of just a general rule. Therefore, we are not able to edit them unless we do a work ticket to Chrome River. Most of these rules are simple rules that most companies use at some point. I think we just came in at the wrong time.
  • The decrease in paperwork is probably the best impact!
  • Employees are able to complete/submit reports faster/easier and then focus on more important tasks.
  • The ability to use Chrome River anywhere allows people to be flexible and work on their reports while traveling or from their mobile devices.
We felt like the setup and configuration was a little stressful due to miscommunication sometimes and just not understanding. In general, Chrome River has a decent method for setting up Chrome River EXPENSE and we worked on something different each week until we had it all set up. However, we felt like sometimes there was miscommunication or just lack of understanding and feel that it was mainly due to all setup meetings being virtual and never actually getting to sit down with the person that was helping us set up our Chrome River EXPENSE. For the most part, making updates and changes has been fairly simple with only minor complications.
I don't know that our organization has benefited much from Chrome River EXPENSE's integrations with our financial software. Before we would enter directly in our ERP software so there was no need for data feeds. So Chrome River has taken away the need for manual entry but added the need for more data feeds, which can sometimes error out.
When first releasing Chrome River, we had a lot of negative push back. End users said it wasn't user friendly and hard to figure out. However, most of that was their negativity toward change and refusal to take the trainings we provided for the system. Now that we have been on it awhile, the people that use it most and/or take the trainings to walk them through it, say that they love how user friendly it is and find it easy to navigate.
Our ERP system is Ellucian Banner. We still use it and just have data feeds to/from Chrome River. Chrome River is much more user friendly for the end-user. For processing payments, Ellucian Banner was all manual data entry for most payments from paper submitted, Chrome River electronic submitting and approvals help our Accounts Payable process payments faster and therefore have more time for other tasks.
I feel like when I submit a help ticket, someone from Chrome River is always quick to respond. Sometimes we have to go back and forth several times to get them to understand what we want. We have also noticed that sometimes we have to submit a ticket more than once because the person that tried to help us the first time just was not understanding. Then when that case closes (usually out of frustration from us), we wait awhile and submit again and the person that helps us that time gets it completed like we want it in a matter of days.
Chrome River EXPENSE is great for reconciling card transactions and for submitting reimbursements. We had to come up with a work-around for submitting reimbursements for non-employees and students at our University and it is not ideal but it works and isn't hard. We also utilize the Pre-Approval aspect, which helps employees obtain pre-approval for the expenses that they need it for.