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.

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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.

We've been using Concur for about 2 years. It works fine, and I get reimbursements promptly made to my checking account, provided that my boss promptly approves the expense report :-)
I do NOT book my airfare through Concur, using the corporate AmEx account. I book it on my own, so I can use my own Mileage Plus credit card. I had knee surgery last year, and didn't fly much, so I lost my Premier Gold status with UA. Therefore, I now opt to book flights using my Premier Club card in order to get benefits such as Premier Access, free bags, etc. I'm careful that the flights I select meet the company cost guidelines (price is no more than $200 higher than the lowest fare). So far, all my flights have passed the Concur auditing process, and have been approved.

Expensive is a relative term. How many person-hours does your company spend on expense reports that could be automated by a system like Concur? If your current system is onerous on the back end as well as the front, a commercial tool would likely be a savings.

Between my wife and I, we have worked at 3 small companies that bought Concur. One was approximately 100 WW, another was 100 NA only, and the third about 250 WW.

We have CONCUR, linked with corporate purchasing cards, which in our case happens to be MasterCard.

After getting over the initial hump, I love the system. Things we charge on the corporate card are automatically linked in, and anything else I need reimbursed I can just enter manually. The ability to upload documentation - either scanned images or e-mail receipts is great.

I like the ability to begin an expense report as soon as a trip is known and to then add expenses to it as the occur over time before finalizing it when the trip is concluded.

There are wacky times where I just have to fudge something, like tax added to a hotel bill that doesn't penny balance when you break it out over the multi-day stay, but there is a way to adjust one of the days so you do balance. The system - at least our application - only has 3-4 boxes for hotel fees, so in a rare case where there are more taxes than lines (county, city, convention, etc.) I can just add a couple of them together and attach a note.

Not specifically CONCUR, but my company ties the reimbursement process to the payroll feed, so the next time the push out payroll I'll also get the reimbursement. Similarly, any money I owe them (non-reimbursable expenses from the corporate card) just get taken out of my next "check".

Some bills come through very clearly - airfare charges for one, others, like hotel bills take a bit of work.

The system also allows for proxies, so people with assistants can have them enter and reconcile the expenses for them.

We also have the ability to charge travel directly to our account line, avoiding the credit card completely, but only if we use the company travel agency, which I won't do since they're terrible.

Been using it for about 6 months now and mostly very positive. I love being able to update an expense claim as im on the go. Means i no longer have to carry large amounts of receipts. Also, love being able to log an expense in the local currency and have it convert to sterling for me (you can also override the exchange rate if required).

Couple of small niggles; adding an email to an expense claim is a pain in the backside. Usually you have to copy to a word document, then pdf it, before uploading. Also, no app for the BlackBerry Z10 which means i have to use my personal iPhone to upload. Final niggle, the support is terrible for it. The response is usually quick but the information provided is sketchy and sometimes incomplete.

On the whole though i find it fine to use and an improvement over our previous manual submission method.

I have been using it at my current and previous jobs without any major complaints. The interface is a bit clunky. Booking one flight but three hotels can be a bit confusing the first time you use it.

The flight search engine is also not the best - plus it is there to enforce corporate travel policy, so I don't really blame Concur for pushing me to take the two stop flight over the non-stop because it is $101 cheaper. For example, my last Mexico trip the non-stop flight was pretty expensive because I was within 14 days on the outbound (or it was just sold). As a DTW captive, I prefer Delta, but Concur pushed me to one-stop flights both ways. I was able to force a better price and routing by a multi-city trip through Chicago to pick up Aero Mexico, then got my non-stop return on Delta.

As for expenses, I love the ability to e-mail myself receipts and have them show up in my receipt store. Just snap a picture with your phone and send it to myinbox @ concursolutions.com and it will automatically be there when you go to do your expense report.

No complaints about payment of personal charges. Typically they are direct deposited in my bank account within 48 hours of manager approval of an expense report. I do find it odd the way they pay Amex. If you have 20 charges on one expense report, Concur makes 20 payments to Amex. If I had a $400 flight, $100 hotel, and $30 dinner, they post paymenst of $400, $100 and $30. Personal charges do not get paid that way - just one lump sum.

The accountants are in a different place, physically and mentally, to the road warriors, who are relatively few in number. They just don't "get it".

Hello: I can assist if you PM me.

Chris Both

I'm experimenting with Gorilla at the moment. I'll let you know how I get on.

Is it possible to recover an deleted expense report in Concur?
 

Hi,

I am new to the Concur expense platform. While trying to remove an administrative expense, I accidentally deleted the month's expense report itself.

Is there any possible way through which I could restore the deleted report?