I hate submitting expenses probably as much as the typical engineer, but Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems.
I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature.
I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state, happily inquiring as to whether I intend to drive 225 miles to my entered street name before a matching entry that’s 4 miles away.
Used to use concur in a past life, now expensify. There's not even words for how much better expensify is.
It wasn't _that_ bad for a lot of entry types, but for me what made it a constant problem were hotels. It wanted a daily rate and number of days. Yet our rates were different day by day, and it made you do a separate tax entry. So you're having to BS a close enough "daily rate" and adjust the tax field of a specific day to adjust for any single penny rounding errors. Then there were resort fees or other things, which it would also make you call out but I think it even had a fixed number of "extra fees" input boxes.
For a set of a few non travel expenses it was only a bit worse than any system ought to be. For travel it was practically unusable and for reasons that actually butchered your report
I use Concur and just enter the total and enter X nights in $CITY for a justification. I don't need to enter nightly total much less any sort of breakdowns. As I said in another comment, a LOT of Concur (and expense software generally) pain relates to the hoops a company makes you go through as opposed to the software itself.
When we first implemented Concur, there was a lot of kvetching. A bunch of requirements got dialed down and while there are still a few silly things here and there, they're easy to work around once you know about them and it's mostly just the very random audit thing at this point.
Disagree. I've used Expensify at a couple smaller companies and a couple versions of Concur at megacorp. The earlier versions of Concur (ca. 2015 – unsure how far behind the current version we were at the time) required you to fire up a VM and use an ancient version of IE to use it. The more modern version was a bit better in that regard.
Expensify though, that was like this interview I had where the CEO walked in at the end, introduced himself, and then explained he wanted me to make their web site "Web 2.0!!!" as they pivoted away from their core business. They hit all of the buzzwords. Ugh. Unfinished and buggy to the point where I fired off an angry email to Expensify for being so shit.
I do remember that being a thing, but I think with the way it auto populated from our booking system meant I couldn't use it. It's been a bit, but I'm pretty sure I had to go through that realization each time too
i had the opposite experience where i moved jobs from and the transition from concur to expensify was brutal. duplicate or blackholed entries and submissions. obfuscated mandatory policies. obtuse allocation methods, and per diem breakdowns felt as though they were being actively hostile to the user.
expensify felt like a jr. high coding project and i hated it to the point of putting a time tracking line item in for expense reports.
I'd hazard a guess that it's because it's sold to finance people that value that sort of functionality (reconciliation of bank statement events with expense claims). Not much thought is given to the end users that have to put up with these tools.
The issue is a typical moral hazard, where the people who buy the software aren't the ones who have to bear the pain of using it.
The requirements from the finance team were probably all around “expense coding is mandatory” and “pick things from a list to avoid typos”; i.e. things that make their lives easier.
When it came to user experience, it got a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or no consideration at all. After all, most finance people rarely if ever travel.
SAP has little incentive to put effort (money) into fixing it, because (1) they’ve got an ecosystem of third parties that do that and also probably serve as resellers or at least evangelists, and (2) complaints are going to help desk, not finance, so SAP’s paying customers aren't advocating for a fix.
Executives are just handing their EA’s a wad of receipts; they don't feel the pain either.
Of course, Google Maps seems to be equally random when it starts guessing your destination.
I reluctantly started using a corporate card for most things because I sort of had to. I don't like not getting the personal benefits but it actually does make (most) things easier with Concur. Only real issue is it's harder to split personal and company charges.
Yes. But it means that all the expenses are accounted for and added to the expense report even if I need to add receipts for some of them and may have to add some additional information, e.g. category. As I say, not my choice but it probably captures some random fees etc. that I otherwise tend to forget about.
Depends. Most companies would have you specify the project/cost centre for every purchase, but amounts/locations/etc are automatically provided by the card issuer.
We used Excel based expense reporting for years, it takes me much less time to assemble my reports on concur, I rather like it, its the least of all evils.
Could it be that by using Excel you just move complexity of reporting to someone who have to extract these data from Excel and import it into some system or analyze it?
After it was sent off, Accounting might just decide to not pay it because no receipt for the coin-op laundry machine I used, when I pointed out it was coin-op laundry, they just shrugged, and then approved it. Meanwhile, while they dicker I'm sitting on multiple thousands of dollars of expenses.
Other issues were making sure I had the correct form, multiple approvals, etc. Now before this process, we used all the same forms but printed out.
Using Concur -
A) the the app to scan my receipts
B) attach receipts to company card expenses
C) deal with some drop downs for some stuff concur has flagged out of process
D) send to manager
Now I lost my per-diem in this, but they cover everything now with the exception of tips to the housekeeper (I've just not tried it yet).
The downside is any payments from the company now take multiple weeks, lol.
Using the excel process, would take me about 1-1.5 hours per week of travel, under Concur its about a about .5-.75 hours per week of travel.
Depends on the company. If they don’t really care it’s more evidence/proof of expense than anything.
My last employer used some stupid Oracle system to audit the hell out of everything. One time I was flagged for taking a suboptimal route that increased toll expense by $3. Hilarious. I spent like 1.5 hours @ $90 on justification of $3.
Yeah, our automated system (Concur) does end up insisting on justifications for why you picked the 12 hour direct flight which is $100 more expensive than the three options with 2 stopovers and a total travel time in the 18-20 hour range (or sometimes even overnight stays in airports).
Feels like a lot of the goal in these systems is to try enforce rules that no person expense manager could try insist on with a straight face. If even 10% of the company gets scared off by the justification demand and books the inconvenient option, that's $20k/yr saved.
Which is still probably peanuts compared to what Concur costs, but that cost is somebody else's problem to the finance person who gets to claim savings on annual flight costs.
My company uses a horrible SAP interface. I then had the complexity of making an Excel sheet that actually works, and making it properly interface with SAP so I only have to use the excel sheet.
As a SAP developer there are so many ways to read Excel sheets but they all suck in one way or another - SAP itself does that but it depends on which SAP module you are programming in (MM/FICO/EWM) so each module has a mediocre implementation to read in XLS.
Somebody got fed up and did a general purpose XLS import library, but some sites forbid you using it.
Without good validation (possibly including locked sheets), people will make all fashions of inconsistent entries that “look right enough” but will stymie automated ingestion.
We had some hellish “use Excel as an interface to ‘real SAP’ process” for budgeting/headcount planning and it was almost utility-free for us as users. Even doing copy/paste would break parts of it, but invisibly to the user in real-time but would fail on import days/weeks later.
You never did this, so you dont know that even the "simplest" thing like writing an address can be done in 50 differenr ways, and then someone has to clean up the data before importing.
Of course you can partially prepare for it by making a file where users have to pick things like town name from a scroll down list (hope your list has every town), but they still can get "creative" and mess it up.
It's not so much complexity as it is removing manual process steps and reducing all the risks and overhead associated with taking data on one format and loading it in to another - at scale
The software we used before Concur was definitely better, or maybe it was the original version of the software before SAP bought them, I'm not sure. Prior to the switch, expense reports would take 5-10 minutes. After the switch, more than an hour easily. They made a lot of changes to Concur to try to help speed up the process, and fill gaps where the old software worked great. However, the final product still ended up far less efficient, and far more confusing.
I had designed a simple excel file and upload template with my piss poor accounting system years ago but, of course, head office wanted to use concur so now it's a bit of a mess and our compliance is far worse than it was...
Automating policy always ends up manifesting all of the crufty, imprecisely implemented “people” and policy issues of an organization, just using computer UIs. This often restricts these kinds of systems from UI / user delight greatness.
I've used Concur and Certify and they are oodles better than the crappy one that my company now uses that probably hasn't changed since the early 2000's and doesn't have any sort of mobile support for uploading receipts.
I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature.
I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state, happily inquiring as to whether I intend to drive 225 miles to my entered street name before a matching entry that’s 4 miles away.