Frogbone

If you do, is Concur auditing your submitted expense reports?
How long does it take for them to process your report? Are there different types of levels? e.g. processed within 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours etc ?

rsqrott

We currently use Concur. The auditors tend to respond quickly, however there has been a bit of a learning curve and a great deal of frustration. Completing and submitting an expense report can now take several hours only to get sent back with something flagged by the auditor.
Auditor responses are usually received within 24 hours. Then there are different levels (or "status changes") as the report gets reviewed. YMMV.

milepig

This may be totally off topic if "Concur Expense Mgmt System" is some outsourced solution which includes auditing services.

We've used Concur in a local environment for years and have grown accustomed to it. The audit time depends entirely on how quickly the assigned person gets to the reports. We go through two levels, one internal at the department level and then at the corporate level. I receive notifications at each step. I've had one or two things questioned by the department, often just something I'd done wrong like attaching the wrong receipt images, never by corporate who I think just hits "approve." The interaction with the payroll process is also seamless and in cases where I've charged a non-allowable expense or when I'm claiming something I hadn't charged to the card the reconciliation is in my next [virtual] check.

We have a linked travel planning service that I never use (I'm glad its optional) as I find that the plane fare is always higher than I can obtain on my own and the hotel choices are limited. If I did use it those expenses would be charged directly to my travel account and wouldn't go through the purchasing card, but that's a minor benefit.

Expense inputting is fairly easy once you get used to it, although itemization can take some time but my assistant does it. There are a very few things that are hard to do, but not many. One example is a multi-day bill that includes a single charge for one expense with others broken out per ngiht so you need to divide it up yourself and then apply a portion to each night and then deal with any rounding left over.

Overall, I think it works fairly well.

goodeats21

Concur can be configured by each end-user organization to alter the approval and audit flows. Most likely, timing for these is going to be more dependent on internal resources of the organization. For example, my boss gets a notice when I submit an expense report. He can either "look at/approve" it immediately, or next week. Which will be different then someone else's boss. And similarly, our Finance team has someone that looks at them for adherence to travel/expense policy. How quickly they perform that task is different than other organizations.

I am not aware of any "audit" done by Concur itself, perhaps outside of automated flags. But again, these flags are controlled by the organization.

Concur is just the system (software) being used.

goodeats21

Agree with this. Hotel itemizations are a pain. In addition to the single charge added to the bill for something (dinner), it is also a pain when room rate changes over the course of the stay.

Often1

Concur is simply a database overlay which can be used to assure compliance with travel policies at the booking and reimbursement stages or used for just one purpose or the other.

How long it takes to reimburse is 100% within the control of your organization. As soon as you submit your report, whoever approves it could do so, send it to someone with a finance function and that person could run down to your office with an envelope full of cash.

So, it call comes down to your organization's approval process, how important the people in that process consider your reimbursement and how long it takes for the finance side of the house to process and how reimbursements are actually made.

It's no different than booking. People who complain that Concur won't let them book F are wrong. It is their employer who has programmed the software not to permit F.

Silver Fox

If it is domestic (UK) I am usually paid within 24 hours, sometimes even at weekends, from the time I have put the scanned receipts in. If it is international it takes the same time to process but longer to get paid but that is not Concur. Concur just does what it is told by the company.

t325

Concur doesn't audit your expense report. If you want to expense hookers and blow, the Concur system will let you, and no one who works at Concur will care. All auditing is done by your employer, who may have something to say about that expense report.

darthbimmer

The last several years I've worked for companies using Concur and Expensify. None of the employers have had special auditing done by the services, just basic compliance checks like "Flag if a receipt is not included" and "Flag if meal expense is over guideline." Any questioning of an expense, or rejection of an item/report, comes from someone within the employer. It wouldn't surprise me if the expense services offered greater auditing capabilities; though if so none of my employers have utilized them.

rsqrott

Concur does offer an auditing "service" to make sure that everything is in compliance with your company policies, that receipts are correct, etc. It's an option (for an additional fee). My company uses this and this is what initially caused the most frustration.
And yes, hotel itemizations are a pain.

Duke787

I actually love Concur. We just moved to it earlier this year and it more or less auto-approves in-policy expenses on the spot and seems to have smart logic to auto-approve "in-policy but requires receipt" purchases as well. The reimbursement time has substantially decreased and the process is so much easier than it used to be.

I agree hotel itemizations are a pain and sometimes require some funny math because of the way the tool is laid out (especially when there are different rates every night and then different local taxes based on those different rates) but on the whole it's been a huge improvement for us.

Ours is also directly layered into our travel portal so that makes things flow much more smoothly too because Concur serves as both the booking tool and the expense tool so that helps support the auto-approving.

pinniped

I have a love/hate relationship with Concur. I actually love the app: I just take photos of the receipts directly from the app...far simpler than our old SAP process which basically required you to get all of the receipts from a trip into a single large PDF to submit with the report. People here all had slightly different ways of doing it, usually involving spending time taping receipts together, going to the copy room, sending yourself a scan, etc. (If there are more elegant ways of doing this within SAP, I never figured them out.) So Concur is a big leap forward in terms of preparing and submitting a report.

The hate part is the Concur audit step. Yes, we use that - offshore contractors from Concur do 1 round of audit before it actually gets back to the real approver. Those guys consistently choke on hotel receipts that have multiple expenses, hotel room rates that change mid-stay, and (oddly) my own airport's parking receipts. I suspect there's a bot trying to scan for things first and then humans who look as well, but the rejected reports are usually because somebody didn't look at something in the right place. That part is frustrating.

Once I get through the Concur audit, my own approver finishes it within a day or so...