It's great for accounting... probably. Everyone else? Not so much...
Updated January 28, 2020

It's great for accounting... probably. Everyone else? Not so much...

Andrew Richardson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

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Overall Satisfaction with Concur Travel and Expense

It's being used to book business flights and submit, review and process expense reports. It's a centralized location to do everything related to business travel. It expedites the painful process of booking and getting reimbursed for business travel. It also can help planning trips and finding the cheapest or best flights.

Pros

  • Once a report is submitted it is pretty easy.
  • Integrates into our single sign-on well I guess.
  • It seems great for accounting! I'm sure it makes some pretty good reports!

Cons

  • UI and UX is atrocious. It's basically a master class in what not to do with your UI.
  • Functionality is abundant but it's obscured under many many layers of bad UI and poor information architecture.
  • There are so many ways the interface leads you to believe a process is "complete" when it actually isn't. There are a lot of fields that don't matter but are still present.
  • Logs for financial audits.
  • I'm not sure if there are faster reimbursement processes, but maybe there's less back and forth?
  • There is no time saved creating expense reports. It's still a very painful process that pretty much everyone complains about.
I was not involved with the decision to go with this solution over others.
We use Tripit, which is useless in my opinion. I'm sure it's integrated with some sort of travel pricing tracker but I couldn't say what it is.
It's probably helped us scale. Whatever the old system was probably wasn't robust enough to handle hundreds of employees submitting expense reports on a single month (around the time of our conference).
I don't really have to deal with any particular person other than my immediate manager to book flights, which is pretty nice. I can easily input my mileage rewards number so I get the rewards for my business travel. Once you've done an expense report two or three times it gets fairly automatic.
I would imagine it's great for the accounting side of things. It seems to integrate well with flight schedules and pricing. To have everything flowing through a single system and have records of what exactly was submitted, when it was submitted, and how much it cost is probably great. But it's just a nightmare on the end-user experience side. Error messages are unclear or obscured. Confirmation messages are misleading (booking a flight will "confirm" the flight but won't actually book it unless you hit "next" about 2 more times).

SAP Concur Travel & Expense Benefits

Usability is completely awful. The flight booking is riddled with unnecessary backtracking and important messages hidden at the bottom of the page. The worst part is when you manage to actually find a flight that you want you "confirm" it and it sends you to a page that appears that the process is done but if you scroll down about 3-4 page lengths to the bottom you see a message that its not actually done and you have to continue to confirm about two more pages. This has lead multiple co workers to think they've booked flights and then realize days later (as rates go up) that they actually didn't and they need to do everything again.

I truly don't know if I've experienced a usability nightmare this bad before.
  • It automates who I need to send reports to. I don't know where it goes but it goes to the right person.
  • It's built into my companies application dashboard.
  • Microsoft Azure SSO
I don't have to memorize/store another password and user name. I can use my main company user name and password and it automates all my information into the system so that expenses get submitted to the correct person.
They've automated expenses reimbursement, so I get automatic deposits for my expenses. Previously they would cut a check, put it in a file structure by the Admin's desk and you'd have to know it was there and remember to go get it, then cash the check. That much preferred, I believe they just have one person working on expenses so I'm sure this software helps to lessen their workload considerably, especially when everyone is coming back from a conference.
It's better than a manual process at least. I've not used other competitors for expenses. Compared to booking a flight through airline sites is a huge pain though. The interface is not intuitive and flexible enough to really evaluate your options. You get exhausted after a while and just pick which ever one looks good enough.
My check gets into my account faster... so that's a success. Everything before that is truly excruciating. Massive amounts of form fields that have unclear labels and purpose. Booking flights is painfully slow and tedious. Not reading every line of UI copy can cause you to have to do it all again the next day or just completely miss booking your flight.

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