Emburse Expense Enterprise (formerly Chrome River Expense)

Avantages

The ease of use, implementation and reimbursement means everyone's life is so much easier. Users, administrators, approvers, it just works.

Inconvénients

I wouldn't call this a con but if I had to look at something that I'm not used to with an ERP its the fact that changes are made in a QA environment and then "pushed" to the Production environment. So there are a few extra steps. However, the mistakes I've made in QA have stayed in QA and I haven't had to figure out how to fix what I've broken. So I guess there is a pro hiding in this con!

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Emburse Expense Enterprise (formerly Chrome River Expense)

Avantages

Emburse automated many AP tasks and cut invoice processing time by 90%, resulting in more time for higher-value work. Users and admins especially enjoy the mobile features and the ability to see exactly where an expense or invoice is in the approval process.

Inconvénients

The Emburse Chrome River help desk needs some work. There are often lengthy turnaround times for their help desk.

Avantages

Not too much to be honest. It’s a steep learning curve for most users.

Inconvénients

Steep learning curve, auto match doesn’t work most of the time

Avantages

Easy to use when submitting expenses, running reports for credit cards expenses and personal expenses for accruals

Inconvénients

the graphic is really basic and has barely no automation

Avantages

I really enjoy the compliance tools to help guide policy. This is helpful to take some human elements out to focus on less monotonous review.

Inconvénients

There is major issue in using Hotel expense tools to be compliant with U.S. Federal regulations for travel and expensing to be compliant with FTR, JTR, and GSA per diem policies.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Emburse Expense Enterprise (formerly Chrome River Expense) 

Pourquoi passer à Emburse Expense Enterprise (formerly Chrome River Expense)

Avantages

The ease of use and the customization of it to meet our changing needs

Inconvénients

Since the systems is so customizable it can be hard when there is a issue for support to understand why you do something a certain way.

Avantages

The product is very easy to use and quite intuitive. The CRSnap APP is a great tool and make uploading receipts to the Receipt Gallery less time consuming. Integration on the most part was very good.

Inconvénients

There are two things that I really would like to see some changes and they are, I would like the ability to have more customization on the Tiles. As a religious institution our expenses are often quite different from the corporate world.
Second, we are still having difficulty integrating our feed with our OBT, Egencia. We have to map our expense feed from our credit card company.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Emburse Expense Enterprise (formerly Chrome River Expense)

Avantages

Tiles are easy to use and explain. Process for submitting and tracking expenses is user friendly.

Inconvénients

- Importing in Pcard expenses and receipts seems to take too many steps and are at different visual points for users.
- The initial form is not configurable to select the type of expense report you are completing FIRST

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Emburse Expense Enterprise (formerly Chrome River Expense)

Avantages

the team is nice and they are well meaning

Inconvénients

the chrome river was a disaster. some very basic things like check numbers were very difficult to obtain, this system was poor designed. and we had to pay for the useless system anyway!

Avantages

I use Chrome River Expense to manage expenditures in my legal practice. This tool has allowed for quicker, more convenient expense tracking than previous tools and practices.

Inconvénients

There is a bit of a learning curve with Chrome River Expense, but once you get the hand of it, you quickly realize how many functionalities this powerful tool offers.

Avantages

Chrome River is highly accessible and available across many devices and platforms. You basically just need and internet connection. This allows us to work and function across many dispersed offices. It's a fairly easy interface for the average user, and puts the ability to quickly submit an expense in the purchaser's hands. We are able to send data to and from Chrome River, which is vital. Emburse stays ahead with technology and is working on AI receipt readers.

Inconvénients

The integration certainly felt like a struggle. Basic data feeds were easy, but when we updated our accounting software from Elite Enterprise to Elite 3E, the export integration - which was fully handled by the CR development team - did take quite a bit of time and effort to get right. It's working great now though, but was more effort than anticipated to set up initially. I would advise to keep custom rules simplified if possible too. Overall the product is good, it's just about getting it set up in my opinion.

Avantages

The ability to track where in the process the expense report is, is my favorite part. The software helped us come from the paper document into the real world. When COVID19 hit, travel could still be approved even though there were many restriction on travel at the time. Thank you Emburse Chrome River for an excellent software package.

Inconvénients

When we first went live with Chrome River then, we went live with the Mercury version and a lot of things were still on the Platinum version so a little inconvenient at the time. Here in 2021, everything is in Mercury so really there is not any cons.

Avantages

Emburse Chrome River has empowered the local admins more every month we've been a customer. This allows us to create a familiar and intuitive system for our users.

Inconvénients

Would still like additional capabilities for reviewers/approvers to modify expense reports. I believe CR is moving in this direction soon, however. This will be a great change!

Avantages

CR Expense makes expense reports incredibly easy, both from the submission to the approval. The newer apps also alleviate the need to collect a folder of receipts that you have to later attach to paper and scan in manually, as with the app you can sign in on your phone or tablet and take a picture of the receipt right there. For other things, like receipts you receive via email, it was just as easy to sign into the site and upload a PDF copy of the email. Or if you still want to do everything at once, you can upload all your receipt images and attach them to individual items that way as well. With the available options and easy use there is no reason for people to be missing images or late on submission

Inconvénients

The only down side/complaint I have is the "old" version (pre-mercury) still requires flashplayer. And I don't believe the admin tool has been migrated to mercury either so you still need to go into the old site to manage anything manually or investigate problems

Avantages

This software lets our users attach receipts hands free by either emailing receipts or using the Chrome River SNAP app. This allows delegates to go in and create expense reports for our users who would rather have their assistant perform this practice. The software is also usable on any computer, smart phone or tablet allowing users to work from anywhere they have an internet connection. Chrome River is also integrated with our Corporate credit card (US Bank) so transactions come through showing our users exactly which items need to be submitted. The product also integrates with Uber, Lyft, and Spot Hero so those receipts are automatically sent to Chrome River.

Inconvénients

We have not had any major issues with the software. The OCR function for reading receipts does not always work as well as you would like but this only makes users select a different expense type than is suggested.

Avantages

The flexibility of mobile use and user interface

Inconvénients

The limitation of customization of Mexico VAT

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Emburse Expense Enterprise (formerly Chrome River Expense) 

Pourquoi passer à Emburse Expense Enterprise (formerly Chrome River Expense)

Avantages

The routing rules, compliance rules and the ease of being able to track items quickly. Enabling the user to have more flexibility in timing and to not spend the majority on their time on "paper-work" shuffling. Creating an "all-in-one" place for reporting and multiple functions that can reduce headaches from both the fund manager, auditor, payables' team and the users.

Inconvénients

The platform becoming not a fully functional system and the fix for the problem taking months to correct when all of the programming and configuration was completely in tact prior to any "upgrade" globally.

Avantages

Investing time on the front end of this product is well worth the results in the end and the overall buy-in of fellow employees. Keeping the initial screen simple is the key to employee adoption rates being higher than normal.

Designating an implementation person or two (cross-training is key) is all that is needed. Do not rely on the partner from Chrome River to tell you what you need. They will interview you and guide you but the important thing to remember is that this will be your software to operate once it is ready to be deployed.

Inconvénients

Not much honestly. When I implemented it there wasn't much OCR technology built in but that was something that was being developed.

Avantages

All of our travel is processed through Chrome River. I really appreciate the ease of use of the product. It is also very easy to teach and create training materials. Our travel card program integrated very well with the software.

Inconvénients

I would like to see more scoped administrator roles to choose from.

Avantages

The ease of use for end users, allows our end users to submit expenses on a digital platform form the pen and paper that were used prior to our change.

Inconvénients

At this time I do not have anything that I dislike about this product.

Avantages

The user interface is very easy to use. We have the person load feeding from our HR data, so new employees are automatically fed into the system. When an employee leaves they are also removed from ChromeRiver

Inconvénients

The itemizing of hotel bills has been an issue when the hotel does not send all the information. Not really a chromeriver issue, because the hotel is not sending the information, but the users see it as a problem with ChromeRiver. This process has gotten much better since we originally went on the system

Avantages

There is very little to like about it.

Inconvénients

It may work great for linking receipts photographed with a mobile device, but it is lousy for reconciling expenses made with a corporate credit card where staff turn in expenses that are scanned on flatbed scanner and PDF'd. CR frequently misreads $$ amounts, and then when you attempt to match a scanned receipt in the Report, it incorrectly assigns the "Pay Me" option.

Avantages

Very easy to use, has a lot of report functionality and can add notes and attachments super easily as needed.

Inconvénients

Limited on approval routing, but not so much that it has been difficult to adjust to.

Avantages

That it's easy to use and keeps us in compliance.

Inconvénients

The turnaround time when we make a change or add a tile.

Avantages

I am so happy that this system was in place prior to COVID19. Electronic invoicing made it easy to review and approve expense reports and pre-approvals for travel. Routing steps that were already determined per index made it easy for approval to be completed without requiring signatures from everyone. Adobe signature is not readily available for everyone.

Inconvénients

We have had some issues with the files from Chrome River being