Great Tool to Retain Employees
May 22, 2018
Great Tool to Retain Employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Expense
Overall Satisfaction with Concur Expense
In most companies I worked for, Concur is the employee expenses tool used by the whole organization. For a particular Management Consultancy, where most employees travel to client sites to deliver services, Concur tool is a godsend. The firms I worked for are generally project driven. By project, one has to track each expense as Billable or Non-Billable. This helps in segregating expenses at the lowest possible level and billing all the billable expenses to the client.
The majority of expenses for a traveling consultant are Flights, Hotels, Car rentals, ride-hailing, and Restaurants. From Concur, one can search flights and hotels and book them without going out. If an employee does not book the lowest priced flight, he has to provide a justification in Concur and the same will be sent along with all the possible flight options to the approver in the notification. This helps in controlling and reducing spending.
Further, Flight, hotel, and Uber loyalty account numbers can be stored in the employees' profile and when the employee books them from Concur, most of the information is auto-populated reducing manual data entry. Restaurant receipts can be emailed to Concur and Concur will read the receipts using optical character recognition and populate most of the data.
The majority of expenses for a traveling consultant are Flights, Hotels, Car rentals, ride-hailing, and Restaurants. From Concur, one can search flights and hotels and book them without going out. If an employee does not book the lowest priced flight, he has to provide a justification in Concur and the same will be sent along with all the possible flight options to the approver in the notification. This helps in controlling and reducing spending.
Further, Flight, hotel, and Uber loyalty account numbers can be stored in the employees' profile and when the employee books them from Concur, most of the information is auto-populated reducing manual data entry. Restaurant receipts can be emailed to Concur and Concur will read the receipts using optical character recognition and populate most of the data.
- Concur is convenient and handy. The employee's profile can store credit card numbers, loyalty membership numbers with airlines, hotels, ride-hailing companies, car rental companies etc. All this information can be auto-populated saving time and effort.
- Expenses can be segregated as Billable and Non-Billable. Further, expenses can be sliced and diced into various buckets, like food, travel, car rental etc. This will help the finance team and management to analyze the expenses.
- Concur can be easily integrated with various ERP Systems.
- Receipts can be scanned with a mobile phone and emailed to Concur. Concur will read the receipts and populate the data in the expense reports. The employees can validate the pre-populated expense report and submit it.
- One can book flights and hotels from Concur itself.
- The user experience can be improved. The tool can be made more intuitive. First-time users struggle to find things and in our company, we have to develop Quick reference guides to aid new employees.
- Reporting can be made easier. There are too many mouse clicks required to export one's expense reports into PDF format.
- The hotel and flight search capability can be further improved. As of now, it works but not up to the mark. The experience of booking a flight or hotel in travel aggregators like Priceline is way different.
- Concur tool definitely increased employee satisfaction. I worked for another consulting company with a crappy expense tool and some of the employees left the company as they were not getting their expenses reimbursed on time.
- The ability to track billable and non-billable expenses is critical for a project-driven organization like ours. Concur handles this and this is a huge plus.
- Concur increases the productivity of employees and finance teams.
We use Oracle ERP. We evaluated Oracle iExpenses. Oracle iExpenses is a good tool too, however, our management chose Concur.