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
