Concur then and now - the high points and the places they could develop
May 07, 2021
Concur then and now - the high points and the places they could develop
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Concur Travel and Expense
We use Concur to manage travel booking; to allow our employees to request reimbursement for out of pocket, Corporate Credit Card or Pcard expenses; to enforce our policies regarding travel and expense spending; to report report on compliance and spending; and to facilitate payments to our employees and our Corporate Credit Card provider.
- Their ExpenseIt tool does a good job of capturing receipts and using AI to feed the details to our employees' expense queues.
- Their audit rules are relatively simple and allow us to tweak compliance with our travel and expense policies.
- Their interfaces with our ERP are reliable and allow us to send employee and allocation information easily and to retrieve general ledger bookings for approved reports.
- Their electronic workflows are reliable.
- Their mobile app works well for approving expenses.
- Their mobile app and website work work week for booking travel.
- The reports provided by Concur are not usable for us in their current configuration, requiring either a class on Cognos, an additional reporting service, or for us to manually download all of the information from the approved expense reports and create our own reports from scratch.
- Every good or new service they provide comes at a price and their price tag is already pretty substantial.
- Although we find the creation of expense reports to be rather easy on a computer, the mobile app is difficult and frustrating. Favorite allocations cannot be used and you cannot edit multiple lines at the same time.
- We have saved significant time moving to an expense tool over manual expense reports - $55k annually.
- We were able to reduce our staff by one FTE with the addition of the OCR / AI audit tool - $91k annually.
- We were able to introduce corporate credit cards as a payment method and are now experiencing rebates > $200k annually.
- With the audit rules and audit software in place, we have seen a reduction in out of pocket spend of $258k and a reduction in mileage claims of $11k.
Concur was considered an industry leader when we evaluated them against American Express and Wells Fargo. At that time, there were just not other players in this field that could bring the features and value that Concur offered. They continue to innovate and to expand their services to meet changing trends and preferences in travel.
Our ERP is integrated with Concur. With the data exchanges, we are able to send current employee data, including their department and their approving manager to Concur. We send an active listing of projects, project codes and overhead general ledger codes for employees to use when creating their expense reports. We import the allocation data from approved expense reports directly to our general ledger so we always have a real time look at spending. Concur is integrated with a software provider called Pivot Payables that allows us to pull expense lines and receipts for customer billing and we have Concur integrated with AppZen, which uses OCR and AI to read expense reports and receipts to spot duplicates, flag out of policy spend and route concerns to a queue for manual review.
When moving from manual expense reports to their software, our organization began to spend much less time handling receipts and doing non-value added tasks. Receipt retention and report approval is very easy from a mobile device, which is key when your main business is not sitting at a desk all day. We were able to move all travel bookings to this tool which allows us to apply our travel policies, report on spending and to keep abreast of any risks that our travelers that day might face.
By Concur enabling receipt capture and mobile approvals, employees can work on their expense reports through out their days - without the need to report to a desk and make creating an expense report a huge task. Admins are able to review all flagged reports before sending them along for approval - something that was just not possible without OCR and AI. Reports are paid on our behalf, without the need to create manual payment requests.