Emburse Certify vs. Routespring

[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

Routespring has worked great for us for following reasons:

1. We prefer not to have our employees pay for travel to avoid the reimbursement process as much as possible. Routespring's ability to configure centralized payments and extensive prepaid inventory helps us achieve that.
2. We need closely control our travel spend as it directly impacts our cost of goods. The ease of configuring budget controls at multiple levels help us manage the costs almost effortlessly.
3. Above all, Routespring has an excellent team of support people. Our team is super happy with their professional approach and responsiveness. We have never had any issue.
4. On the admin side as well, I have always had a great experience in getting things done with the help of their account management team. We have been able to make changes and process updates on very short-timelines. They have competitive rates and they always maintain consistent communication on how to bring costs down.

• 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

• User-friendly approval process
• Centralized payments for all travel
• Excellent & very responsive customer service and account management
• Flexible budget controls

• 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

• It's hard to tell where to go to book a flight right after you create an account.
• It is a pretty basic design - I think they'd raise confidence in their tech skills even further if the site were a little flashier.
• The site is geared toward companies whose employees all have the same email address domain. However, they are able to accommodate different email addresses if you provide them so they can add the domains to your account.

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

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

After trying for weeks to (unsuccessfully) set up an account with another online booking agency, we contacted Routespring to see if they could help us based on the great reviews we saw. It took them about three days total to have everything in place and ready for our guests to start booking their flights while ticket prices were still reasonable. They have been attentive to all of our needs, respond quickly and professionally to guest questions, and are a lot of fun to work with as well. We couldn't have asked for a better partner for this project!

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

Our experience with larger booking agencies has so far been unimpressive. It seems like, because we are a small non-profit with a smaller budget, we were definitely not top of mind for customer service and often waited up to a week for questions to be answered. Routespring is a small but mighty organization that will definitely make a name for themselves in this arena if they continue on the path they're on now. They work hard and quickly to ensure you are satisfied with their service and that your guests have a seamless experience booking travel and accommodations on their platform. It is obvious that they truly care about their clients.

• 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

• This platform saved us many, many employee hours by eliminating the need to book flights for guests, track and approve travel receipts and dispense reimbursement.
• Our guests could easily book their flights in one place with a line of credit we were invoiced for weekly, with our credit card on file as a backup. For the first time ever, our travel planning is completely done two months before the Conference.
• We were able to set spending caps on ticket prices to stay within our budget, and we received notifications if anyone requested a ticket above the limit we set or tried to upgrade on our account.