Emburse Chrome River Expense

Chrome River Expense is fast, fluid, and easy to use the application to report travel expenses done with a corporate credit card or even with a personal card. The application is available for all platforms including desktop, mobile, and tablet, etc. which makes the expense reporting process fast and easy even when you are on the go. Some of the features of the application are – Automated spend control, automated approval routing, credit card integration, Snap and send receipt submission, optical character recognition (OCR), integration with leading financial systems, configurable policies, and routing, online dashboard and self-service inquiries. The application has a powerful analytics engine that saves a lot of time for employers and accounts staff.

You need to spend some time initially to understand it as the tool includes a lot of categories and sub-categories which makes it a little bit confusing to use, but trust me it saves a lot of time. Receipts have to PDF formatted. Ad-hoc functionality seems a little slow and can be improved.

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.

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.

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

- 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

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

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!