Using mobile travel expense reporting -- your experience
 

I'm looking for mobile travel expense reporting that is easy for the traveler to use. What is your experience with Expensify or Concur? We're currently using TripIt, which seems to be owned by Concur, but could switch to Worldmate which may be linked to Expensify.

I run a small consulting firm that provides advice and training. Our consultants do lots of international travel (probably 70% of travel is international). We are reimbursed by our clients for all (or almost all) travel expenses. We typically invoice our clients after a training session or monthly on advisory gigs and include our expenses on the invoices. Currently, we have to wait for busy and sometimes lazy consultants to compile all of their expenses and sort them out by client. [I give my executive assistant my paper receipts and she looks on the credit card sites to get the others like Uber, but not all of the folks have dedicated EAs]. Everyone has an iphone and ipad and could in principle scan the receipts in in real-time. We use Quickbooks for our accounting.

With any solution, would it be easy to scan in receipts and have them tagged to a particular client (or trip) without requiring the consultant to enter the client tag for every receipt?

Are these easy enough to use that you prefer them to dropping them off at an assistant? To sorting out yourself at the end of a trip?

It appears that both Expensify and Concur Small Business have a link to Quickbooks. Does one work better than the other?

Would you recommend Expensify over Concur Small Business or vice versa? Are there others that you would recommend?

me no like Concur
 

I have no knowledge of Expensify, but I can testify that Concur is extremely annoying and frustrating. My company uses it for both travel booking and expense reporting, and it is cumbersome, clunky, inconsistent, frustrating, . . . add your favorite perjorative

My company only uses Concur for expenses, not booking, and I love it. I photo my receipts as I go in the app on my phone, match them to my expenses as they import in from my corp card, submit for the audit/approval trail, then the corp card gets paid on the back end. No manual entry of expenses, physical signatures, physical checks, or !manual card payments. Coming from doing reports in excel, getting physical checks, and making payments myself on a company issued AMEX, I'll take Concur ANY day of the week.

I can see the added level of complexity of booking travel through Concur possibly adding frustration but I'm lucky enough to get to book my own travel myself without need for preauthorization.

I use Concur with a very large company, we use it for booking and expensing.

I love it. I book the trip, the itinerary imports into my expense report and auto-fills the perdiem and allowances, it assumes all expenses on my linked charge card is from that trip and imports them all. It auto-links hotel/air/rental charges with the relevant reservation.

On the go, I use the Concur app to snap photos of all receipts, and then attach them to the charge when it hits and appends to the report.

Concur also has electronic billing directly from most major vendors (airlines, Hilton, Marriott, Hertz/Avis/etc) which submits and auto-connects the e-receipt with the charge, removing the requirement to scan and attach the receipt.

Again, this is with a large company, and using Concur for everything (booking and expensing). I don't know how well it works if booking is separate from expensing, or if you don't have a single card to link to the account.

In my experience, Concur for only expenses but with a linked corp card works just as well with the only added step being either photographing or email-forwarding a receipt that might otherwise be automatically imported. I don't have to organize my reports by trip, so that makes it that much easier... I just submit every $1k as it's imported or at the end of the month.

Well, next month I become a freelancer, and am probably going to try Concur for Small Business ($8/mo per user (one, in my case)). All my travel will go through Concur and charge to my United Plus Visa, so I can link that card to Concur.

I will advise how well it works.

I use Concur with large company for travel and expense booking. Love the expense side of things, especially in conjunction with corp card. App is easy to use as well.

Don't love the travel side and usually end up booking my own rooms.

I'd probably pay $8/month for Concur if I were in your shoes, especially if something free like Expensify (without smart match) didn't cut it.

Yeah. The nice thing with Concur is I can book travel, get e-receipts, snap photos of receipts, smart match, and generate the expense report all in one app.
My stuff has to be compliant with Fed Acquisition Regs, and Concur is an approved booking and expense solution.

Thanks for your input. I have no problem paying $8/month/consultant if consultants use it on a timely basis. The clunkier and more unpleasant, the more we have to nag to get expense reports, etc. It sounds like a get a thumbs down from one FTer and thumbs up from three.

I had read that Expensify was easier to use. Does anyone have experience with both Concur and Expensify? Does one or the other work better with credit cards and also with Quickbooks?

Does anyone have experience using Expensify (but not Concur)?

I played with Expensify when at my last job, but only the free side and only on the Android app... it was nice, but without the automatic charge importing from a credit card it's hard to compare apples-to-apples with a full Concur implementation.

Concur also just released a new UI that does seem a bit nicer/cleaner/more modern but doesn't seem to change much in terms of functionality. The main improvement I see is quicker access to receipt thumbnails without having to drill down 2-3 layers. It was just rolled out to me today and will become permanent on Feb 15.

Between the Concur UI upgrade and moving from the legacy BMO card to the Diners Club card (with free airport lounge access) I'm pretty happy with what my company's accounting department is rolling out for 2015!