Item: SAP Concur
Rating: 9
Author: Edward Gordon

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize Concur Invoice to manage the entirety of the invoice process throughout our parent and subsidiary companies. Moving from a manual process where we were hand-coding each invoice and hoping that it was sent to managers for proper approval, etc., we are now able to ensure that not only the employee submitting the invoice has approval from their manager for the submission, but also we are able to automatically have the department heads of each cost center added to the approval workflow in order to ensure transparency and accountability in our invoice process.

Pros and Cons

Simplifies and centralizes the invoice process.
Ensures that our fiscal practices in terms of AP are completely trackable and answerable come audit time.
Allows us to ensure that expenses are not coded to departments in which that expense type is not authorized (e.g. we can prohibit food from being coded to a federal contract that prohibits such expenditures).

Very occasionally the optical character recognition process misapplies things like tax or total invoice amount (probably less than 1% of the time).
Setup was a very involved and time-consuming process.
Approvals (especially when Cost Object Approval was added) can make the AP process take much longer than the manual method we'd used before.

Return on Investment

Positive: we've had no instances of audit notes or findings since implementing Concur Invoice in 2018.
Positive: transparency has increased greatly (especially for mid-level program managers who didn't always see what was being coded to their departments in the past).
Negative: Our payment timelines have increased due to the OCR, invoice assignment, coding, and approval processes taking some time.

Alternatives Considered

Expensify

We did a demo of Expensify back around 2018 but were not completely satisfied with the feature set at that time. Concur was a more robust product that fit our needs then (and continues to do so today).

Key Insights

Do you think SAP Concur delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP Concur's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP Concur live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAP Concur go as expected?

Would you buy SAP Concur again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Slack, Relias Learning Management System, Proliant, Microsoft 365, Concur Travel and Expense

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited: Companies in which there are many departments and levels of management where consistency is required. Our agency also is subject to annual full audits; the backup and approval workflows that we have with Concur Invoice make providing documentation to the auditors a simple and straightforward process.

Probably less appropriate in smaller agencies or agencies in which there are not a high number of invoices to process.

Concur Invoice | Accountability and Consistency That We Didn't Have Before

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Concur Travel and Expense