Emburse Certify vs. Emburse Tallie

[Emburse] Certify seems to have been designed with large organizations in mind, particularly those with corporate card programs as opposed to "small business" cards. The integration with American Express Business accounts failed after less than a year, and was not reestablished before we pulled the plug on the whole project. Even worse, [Emburse] Certify's support team wasn't able to offer alternatives.

Incentivized

Tallie is well suited for those that utilize Bill.com or another of its compatible integrations. Small businesses to medium-sized corporations can (fairly quickly) leverage Tallie. Tallie would be less appropriate for organizations that already lean heavily on Salesforce, NetSuite, or Workday -- Concur or Expensify might be more suitable options.

Incentivized

• Customer service/support: They have an incredible team. We are fans of the chat option and 99.9% of the time our issues are solved within a 5-minute window.
• Listening to customers: they are always looking for ways to improve their product. They have free conferences sprinkled around various cities. They are worth trending. They provide "what's new in Certify" as well as round-table discussions specifically addressing how their customers are using the product and what they have learned along the way.
• Keeping their product up to date: Certify takes back various suggestions from the conference to enhance their product. I have been at every conference they have had and have actually seen customer suggestions get implemented into the program.

Incentivized

• Very intuitive - liked how it was convenient to use when uploading receipts and liked how it would attempt to figure out what was on it so it could pre populate the required fields.
• The ability to add multiple categories and subcategories for where your purchase falls in the organization was super helpful when keeping organized.
• Mobile app to upload receipts on the fly has helped increase the amount of folks remembering to submit their receipts.

Incentivized

• The ability to add a receipt after a report has been submitted would be helpful. This would simplify processing as opposed to disapproving the report and sending it back to the user for correction and re-submission.
• Though not a fault of Certify, our users drive multiple destinations every day, rather than occasional trips from city A to city B. Therefore, capturing mileage is a time-consuming process for our users.

Incentivized

• Tallie suggests it is able to read receipts and place them into the correct category, but I find myself updating these sections each time I upload a receipt. The system should be updated to read multiple receipts.
• Tallie sometimes rejects photos if they are not specific enough. This can be frustrating since it is sometimes difficult to upload receipts quickly while on the road. However, this rejection is not a common occurrence.
• More often then not, Tallie's emails go to my junk folder. Tallie should work on their spam count for Outlook.

Incentivized

I am very used to Certify's components. But some users that I manage still have a hard time fixing their expense reports no matter how many times I try to teach them. The Editing expense Report and Adding Expense Report option sometimes gets confusing and causes some employees to enter transactions twice. There should be a better layout to make it easier for them to edit and finish their expense reports. I try to teach Certify as much as I can, but the usability should be a bit easier so it is less confusing.

Incentivized

Certainly not as robust as bigger products/names on the market, but the features/solution it offers do extremely well, with a good mobile app experience and a nice, clean interface. It helped our organization (7 locations) go paperless, which rapidly improved our expense capture and timeliness in reporting and also gave our staff a better, user-friendly expense report and reimbursement process.

Incentivized

The measure of support is how well they respond when you really need them, like when the system is not performing correctly. We have been on the platform less than a year, and there have been at least 2 instances, where the platform was down. The 2nd time was the day before out fiscal year end. And they need a development website. When they are making changes to your LIVE instance, and things go wrong, the client is the first to know about it! I've come to understand that Certify has tiers of support. Those in tier 1, barely know more about the software than the users. I sent a request for a report that shows expense reports currently pending approval and after 5 days of back and forth I was told to build it myself.

Incentivized

As a user of Tallie, I have never needed any support to use it. It is simple, logical and needs no training to use. As a company, I don't think we need any ongoing support but I believe the setup process, which they guided us through a year ago went well.

Incentivized

We used Concur prior to Certify. It cost 5x as much and was not worth the money. We also looked at Expensify, which had minor issues compared to what we are dealing with in Certify. Certify does not compare to Concur. The platforms are in two different leagues. Expensify is a good comparison and it is compatible with major ERPs like Sage Intacct. Nexonia, is actually also an Emburse product and likely would have been a better fit given it's integration capabilities with Sage Intacct.

Incentivized

Both Tallie and Expensify are quality products that help with credit card management. Setting up an account, if you are only managing one company either product is equally qualified, however, if you are managing multiple companies, I find Tallie is easier for the set up and management of companies. In Tallie companies are treated as separate products, when you log on you select which company you are working in and while in that company you don't have access to another, whereas in Expensify companies can be intermingled. This could have is benefits, but from an outsourcing point of view it can make set up and management of clients harder. With assisting users, in Tallie as long as a user has the right permissions and access to a company, they can access any user's account in order to process charges, or assist users by masquerading as them. In Expensify, users have to give admin access to their accounts through their co-pilot access, this isn't an issue if users aren't likely to need help or help from more than one admin person, but as your client list and users grow, this type of access can be challenging or overwhelming.

Incentivized

• We have reduced the amount of time our operations department has to spend booking flights to 0.
• Hotel bookings have been greatly streamlined and we are looking to eliminate human interaction with this process once CC authorisations are handled.
• We have eliminated the wait time between operational travel research and client approval time -- it can all be handled in one single step now.

Incentivized

• It frees up my time by allowing people to self-report in a common platform rather than sending paper expense reports.
• It's several thousand dollars cheaper than Concur and other high-end products.
• It works. It's not easy to get multiple cloud systems to properly integrate and this one seems to get it done.

Incentivized