Concur expense mgmt system
 

My employer is looking to roll out a corporate Amex Card and syncing it with Concur to generate expense reports. Can anyone share their experiences, good or bad, about this type of setup?

Thanks.

http://www.concur.com/

We use it at Kodak... and just migrated to the new version.

It works fine... and brings in the AMEX charges with no problem.

Not sure what other questions you have.

William

We've been using it with our corporate M/C's for a couple of years (?) and it seems to work fine. Early on there were a few kinks with some items not posting to concur that were on our card statements but it all got worked out.

We use it at work with our VISA and the program works real well and makes it easy to get reimbursement for expenses out-of-pocket that goes directly to my bank account and for expenses that go directly to the company VISA. Internal policies require us to charge airline tickets to the card and we should do hotels the same but not absolutely required. I am waiting for the time they require use of the company VISA for hotels. Other stuff I put on personal AMEX or Diners for the points so if the question is whether you get to use mileage earning cards it depends on how your company sets up its policy or restrictions. Makes reimbursement of travel pretty painless now with a lot less paperwork.

I've been using Concur for over a year now. Compared to other systems I've used it is VERY, VERY good. I do a lot of multi-currency reports and Concur automatically downloads and converts AMEX statements for me. Concur, because of its automatic link to my AMEX bill forces to me reconcile everything that comes in on my card. I really never have to worry about forgetting to expense something becuase it will be there in Concur staring me in the face every time I log on.

In addition, I find the payment reporting, itemization (for hotel expenses) and history features all very intuitive.

I'd give Concur an unqualified thumbs up!

My only beef is that can take days for some expenses to get downloaded from Amex. I've had to wait 4 days after it hits Amex for some expenses to show up in Concur. Otherwise it works fine.

Not as good as their old "QuickXpense" client program, but better than a spreadsheet.

Warning: you need to disable any pop-up blockers when using the web site.

Concur Consultancy Service
 

Do you know any company providing consultancy services to implement Concur software?

This but otherwise it is pretty good. No other complaints.

Wow, this is so coincidental. In the last ten minutes I was just reviewing an enterprise proposal from Concur.

Can anybody suggest a few other vendors, with competing packages? Our company GL is on SAGE/MAS90.

Chrome River.

My company uses Concur. I don't travel at all for work here, so I really only use it to expense the odd cab ride and my monthly cell phone bill. Of the expense reporting systems I've used, it's by far the best. I don't have a corporate card, so I can't comment on how it integrates with that.

The UI is nice and logical. Workflows are logical. No annoying little gotchas that I've found.

As one who's company is now using Concur for travel booking (was before only for reimbursement process), I'm terribly unimpressed with its response speed, the lack of granularity in selection criteria and the poor communication/insufficient control it provides.

For instance, it usually takes me anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour to book a trip. Much of that is going back searching and re-sorting flights as well as having to manually click thru when pricing hotels to determine whether or not each is within per diem. What's worse is what I've called the "poor communication/insufficient control" above. When you've actually chosen a set of flights, rather than buffering it and booking/purchasing the whole trip at once, by clicking "reserve" on the flight set, Concur goes and immediately purchases them. This is good if that's the only thing you're doing but if you're trying to plan where your stays might be as well as what's available which nights in which cities or having to completely re-work your trip, Concur is a sucky software framework in which to try to do any useful travel plan execution.

Perhaps if your assumption in developing Concur is that all you are doing is simply going from A to B, getting a car, staying one place, it might be ok. However, if there's any complexity in your travel such as multi city, same day travel, etc., the time you end up spending in Concur is painful.

David

The application itself is pretty good, although if your implementation requires that you use AMEX, you end up with all the drawbacks of the American Express travel and card systems.

Where the application is strongest is in the area of currency translation and calculation, where the process is almost transparent for the user who submits charges in foreign currencies.

The application also has a good interface for selecting flights and hotels. Unless it is bound rigidly to the AMEX system, once the user submits proposed travel dates and times, the system returns a selection of appropriate options to choose from. This has two benefits.

First, it automates the itinerary selection and ticket purchase process, thus eliminating a "corporate travel" entity. In real terms this means you can avoid leaving for trips at stupid times, enduring ridiculous routings or excessively long connections.

Second, it provides options in terms of providers, and it seems to do a good job of providing a decent pricing. I have had team members who needed to work on a project in a specific location choose different carriers and routes according to their own preferences, and the cost differences where not significant enough for me to be concerned about overspending.

The downside in using it is the same as all applications, in that the deployment needs to be well run, otherwise the configurations selected upon implementation can serve the needs of the travelers and company less than perfectly.

Is Concur expensive for <50 staff small companies?

I can't find price info on their website, but I'd like to sell our finance/accounting people on it as we have an extremely onerous expense reporting system at the moment.