Emburse Certify and TripActions are spend management apps. They’re designed for companies that need to track and control spending by traveling employees. With these apps, a manager can automatically record the expenses an employee incurs during a trip and enter them into other accounting apps like NetSuite or Quickbooks. Managers can also use these apps to create spending policies that block unauthorized transactions and set spending limits on payment cards. So I decided to see how Emburse Certify and TripActions compared to each other.
Payment Cards
Emburse and TripActions are both fintech app developers. While these companies provide branded debit cards to the clients who use their spend management apps, they are not banks. They have access to these debit cards through Stripe Issuing. Stripe, a payment processor, has a partnership with fintech-friendly Celtic Bank in Utah. Spend management apps can issue their own debit cards through Stripe’s program. Ramp, a spend management app that competes with both Emburse and TripActions, also uses the Stripe Issuing service.
I’d say that neither app has the advantage here. Emburse and TripActions both provide debit cards issued by the same bank to their customers and they also have partnerships with the same payment processing intermediary. The Stripe Issuing page provides more detail about how these cards work. For example, Stripe can send physical cards to 20 countries, including the US, but it charges additional fees to send payment cards to foreign countries.
Mileage Tracking
If you’re reimbursing your employees’ travel costs, you might be interested in mileage tracking. A mileage tracking app will tell you how far an employee traveled during a trip so you can estimate their fuel costs for that trip. Emburse Certify and TripActions both offer mileage tracking as a feature, but their mileage tracking services have a few differences.
Emburse Certify uses GPS data to track mileage. This indicates that the Emburse Certify app is tracking the location of the employee’s smartphone directly and this should provide accurate results. GPS tracking also provides additional evidence that the employee traveled along a specific route, so your company doesn’t have to rely on the employee’s report.
TripActions allows employees to submit pictures of their odometers before and after the trip. They can also submit reports from Google Maps that show the entire travel route for the trip. The employee can also upload their own report to the spend management app. So this app offers a bit more flexibility with reporting, but if you want travel data that’s verified by smartphone location records you can use Google Maps as your data source.
I’d say that this is another tie and neither company comes out ahead here. It would be more convenient for an employee to submit a report from Google Maps than it would be to use another reporting method. Google Maps also uses GPS to track your location on a map, so both companies are basically using the same technology to automate mileage tracking.
Cashback Rewards
Stripe offers 1.5 percent cashback on business purchases for the corporate cards that it provides directly to businesses. Stripe’s corporate payment card program is separate from Stripe Issuing, though. Stripe Issuing is used by financial software companies that also provide spend management tools in addition to debit cards. These accounting automation tools might be more appealing to a company than the cashback rewards.
Emburse doesn’t say anything about a cashback program on its website, so it’s likely that the Emburse card doesn’t have any cashback rewards. On the other hand, TripActions offers a 2 percent rebate on qualifying hotel room reservations and a 1 percent rebate on other qualifying purchases. It’s likely that corporate credit cards offer better rewards, but they might not provide the level of spend management controls that these cards offer. Either way, TripActions is the winner in this category.
Cashback Rewards Could Make the Difference
TripActions and Emburse Certify are very similar apps. Both of them help their clients manage their corporate spending cards. They also provide travel services themselves. These apps don’t just help companies record their employees’ travel costs, they help companies find better deals on hotel rooms and airline tickets. It’s unclear how the pricing for either service works because neither TripActions or Emburse Certify provide much detail about their prices on their websites.
But TripActions offers cashback rebates on its debit cards, and that could make the difference for a company that wants to earn cashback rewards and have access to spend management software. Again, corporate credit cards have better rewards programs but don’t come with the additional budget management and accounting automation services that these apps provide.