Emburse Certify vs. Expensify

[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

I think it's really good for small businesses. At least in the way we use it. It's very good for keeping an eye on employee spending in nearly real time. I'm not sure how it works for larger companies when there is a larger number of people to keep track of.

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

• I am able to submit my mileage and the great feature to put the starting destination and end destination. It auto populates the mileage for you!
• The coniserge is helpful and reminds me when I did not do certain things like submit my report. That’s a nice feature!
• I am able to submit my expenses quickly and it scans the receipts or you can upload a picture of them very quickly.

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

• Cant choose for specific lines of non -reimbursable expenses to several credit cards. only one preconfigured.
• there are limited cards to choose for with Expensify Travel as a corporate cards.
• The policy rules are pretty basic. i would like to have more granular options

Our company will use Expensify for as long as it will fit our purposes. However, it is obvious that once the fast-growing company will reach a certain size, we will need to transition to a more complex system. For our current purposes however, Expensify is great and I would recommend it to everyone

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

So simple to set up and use. It was easy to roll out to all our staff! The demos, instructions, and FAQ's were well written and enabled us to train our staff quickly. We have frontline employees who have mastered the system in a day. The scalability is also perfect. We are able to start with just a few cards and grew that number as our organization needed without any problems.

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

Our rep has been amazing. He has built custom reports for us that have been very time consuming and difficult. Our reps are also currently looking into new submission solutions for us that we are excited about. They came up with this and recommended it on their own without me complaining about an issue. They are about our success and are very excited about the product they offer.

Incentivized

The implementation process went rather smoothly, linking it to the bank and cards was handled easily. without too many unnecessary steps. Getting the accounts setup did take some time, but that would be true with any organization. All in all things went smoothly and I was very pleased with the setup and implementation process

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

Concur is the only formal software I've used, though I think this was only used in my PhD program (2010-2014), so in fairness, it's been a while. I remember Concur being just OK. It was certainly easier to use than the 'upload documents to email' process my former employer had instituted, but it was not Expensify-level smart and easy. At least back then, there was no simple drag-and-drop document parsing for example.

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

• Positives include - timely expense reports to reconcile our fiscal year financials
• Negatives include - the monthly service fee per employee (even if no expenses were generated that month) - it is not cost effective for ALL of our employees to utilize the application.

Incentivized