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Concur...not for the smallest business but a go to for everyone else
December 04, 2015

Concur...not for the smallest business but a go to for everyone else

Craig Blankenship | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Premium

Overall Satisfaction with Concur Travel and Expense

My company is using Concur Travel and Expense across the whole organization. This allows our departments to streamline expense reimbursements and billing to customers in a uniform and easy to manage way. We were able to downsize our travel and expense dedicated employees from 3 employees to 1 employee. The biggest business problem addressed and solved with Concur is the scaleability of expense reports or travel requests. Other problems that are clearly solved by Concur is integration into accounting packages, and organization and metrics of mountains of documents.
  • Concur offers the flexibility to modify and adapt your company settings to address different scenarios such as updated processes, policy changes, group configurations, adding and removing features, limiting or adding restrictions etc. This allows the company to grow and evolve and Concur Travel and Expense seems to grow alongside with the company.
  • Concur streamlines travel and expense and the two modules communicate concurrently with each other. There a features and benefits to this process such as mobile app integration, receipt and travel itinerary management which reduces expense report creation time for the employees. Also, on the administration side it reduces the approval, reimbursement, and expense report reconciliation time frame all while removing human error.
  • Concur stores and organizes hundreds or thousands of documents of information and organizes it in such a way that is easy to bill clients, produce documents for audits or run metrics on the relative health in the organization.
  • Implementation is one of the weaknesses for Concur, I have implemented it for two separate companies. The first time was relatively smooth and we were operational in a few weeks. However, the second time around it took several months to even go live and several more for me to shake down problems to make sure the system works correctly. I am very experienced managing Concur as an admin and I was able to get by but it was a big weakness.
  • Customer support is not great if you call them on the phone, Concur funnels all their requests through their online ticketing portal. They are great if you utilize the ticket system. I actually prefer this system but I have talked to many people who wish their problems could be addressed immediately with a real person on the phone versus having to put in a ticket and wait 24-72 hours or sometimes longer to get things resolved. I am busy and my problems are very technical and complicated and I do not want to devote half my afternoon to fixing a small problem.
  • Integration with accounting packages not under Concur's "ecosystem of partners" can be a challenge. If you use QuickBooks for example it is a five minute process to set up your system to securely send data to and from Concur after the approval steps with no errors. However, my company uses Procas and it is a nightmare to set up the accounting extraction from Concur which is a large data dump of all the info on secure encrypted FTP server. It takes a while to organize the data into an acceptable and error free import file to upload into the accounting software.
  • Reduction of travel and expense staff from 3 full time employees to 1 full time employee.
  • Poor implementation team caused my new company more time and money and was a determining factor into bringing me on to fix.
  • Reduces hour labor cost of other administrative functions from our overhead staff such as payroll, bookkeeping, tax planning and project management
Expensify was the legacy system I first used prior to Concur. While I am big cheerleader for the price and usefulness it had for my company in its early stages, there was a definite point in which we outgrew Expensify and its limited flexibility to grow. Concur does a pretty good job of linking existing systems and making a nice "ecosystem" between all of your existing systems. My example is we could sync with Quickbooks for expense report recording in our General Ledger but at the same time we can create a importable file that can feeds into ADP payroll, eliminating the need to do any hand jobbing of reports during your payroll cycles. Most companies do not have a integrated travel system and in both of my companies we had to use a corporate travel agency that is very pricey. The use of the Travel module in Concur has lowered the fees we use to pay to the travel agency which offset some of the cost of Concur in general.
Concur travel and expense is not suited for small companies who do not travel much or have large and varied expenses. Concur can be a heavy lift to implement, manage, and maintain. Concur is also an expensive solution not the most expensive, but it is not justifiable unless you have a large enough company. I would recommend the product to companies who have contracts or clients that have inherently different properties or policy requirements. I would be more inclined to recommend Concur to a company who has at least one person who has had significant exposure to the platform. If not, I would consider hiring someone to help you through the process. The learning curve can be steep and having an incomplete implementation due to a significant knowledge gap can be devastating and inefficient.