Item: Emburse Chrome River
Rating: 7
Author: Patrick Bigsby

Overall Satisfaction with Emburse Chrome River

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 and Cons

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

It is easy to use overall, but the text input field for the expensed items' descriptions is both too short and too restrictive as to what characters can be used. This problem is compounded by the fact that is does not display the total available characters remaining or flag unusable characters, even after submission. It simply denies the submission, leaving the user to guess what the unusable character is.

Alternatives Considered

I don't have any previous experience with similar products.

Key Insights

Do you think Emburse Chrome River delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Emburse Chrome River's feature set?

Yes

Did Emburse Chrome River live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Emburse Chrome River go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Emburse Chrome River again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Emburse Chrome River is generally very easy to use and makes keeping a running documentation of expenses over, say, a month to be very simple. However, the more complex your individual expensed items are, the more difficult it would be to submit thorough, accurate descriptions of the items. This could also be more complicated if your documentation is not easily transformed to a PDF.

Emburse Chrome River Feature Ratings

Comments

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An easy to use tool for reporting expenses