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A de facto standard that gets the job done most of the time. Could use a ground-up restore
Updated November 20, 2020

A de facto standard that gets the job done most of the time. Could use a ground-up restore

Joshua Henke | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Standard

Modules Used

  • Expense

Overall Satisfaction with Concur Travel and Expense

Used by the entire organization for basic travel and expense. It's not any more complicated than that, as the product is the epitome of a "point solution."
  • Travel
  • Amex integration
  • User interface is ancient and clunky.
  • Reliability. Their infrastructure must be poorly designed because of the significant outages regularly.
  • Easier and faster than managing paper.
  • Easier to enforce travel policy, specifically passive controls for travel costs.
The interface and reliability between Concur Travel and Expense and just about any other product I've used, demoed, or seen are funny. It's a complex system, so it needs a ground-up rebuild of the interface to improve navigation, potentially improving speed for entry, approval, and processing. Granted, my company could also revisit the implementation and our own classifications and rules.
We tried to integrate with NetSuite (we're even paying for the connector), but two important things stopped the implementation:
  1. Why tether our business-critical financial system to one that is so unreliable? I expressed concern regarding that wisdom. Concerns of data corruption are part of that, though we didn't get far enough past the principle to determine if this would be an issue in practice (robust integration concept could prevent this particular issue).
  2. Lack of metadata. Department, Class, Employees, etc., those all are still managed manually and must be kept in sync. This one didn't bother me much, but it bothered other folks. It seems like it would be best for Concur Travel and Expense to keep that info in sync with the financial system.
I can't answer this well. We continue to use it, so the decision-makers must be happy enough with the ROI. Fortunately, I don't have to do much in the way of maintenance or administration. Any new hires have a good chance at familiarity with the production, so we are saved a little investment in training. That it has integrated travel, and Amex integration means less for Accounting to manage.
Somehow, it's the de facto standard, perhaps because they were one of the first to space and because of their Travel and Amex pieces that make T&E management convenient. If you can handle regular outages and an antiquated interface, this may be the tool for your organization.

SAP Concur Attributes

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

No

Are you happy with SAP Concur's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP Concur live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of SAP Concur go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy SAP Concur again?

No

Mostly, the UI needs a major overhaul. It’s not a consumer product, but the experience feels overly clunky.

As an administrator of the system, I find it strange to navigate and configure. Menu paths and arrangement of options don’t make sense. They recently updated this, and it looks better (pretty colors, attempt at using sensible images), but the organization is still non-sensical.

We recently got rid of Travel and do not have the Professional version. Now many of the settings we still need as Expense owners have been removed from any menu paths. I still had a URL so I was able to gain access to Administrative functions, but Support didn’t have an answer for me regarding how I should get certain things configured (eg SSO)
  • Copying a previous expense report
  • Administration
  • Entering expense reports
Being the de facto standard among larger businesses, most people don’t need to be trained.

We recently stood up an integration with NetSuite to greatly reduce the administrative overhead and time of moving expenses into our GL, in turn introducing very quick reimbursements.
It can grow easily with a business, handling plenty of volume. However, the UI inefficiencies add up. The pricing can work for or against a business, as it’s based on volume. If you can discipline your employees to group their expenses perhaps on a monthly basis, you can keep the cost down a bit.
I may be reviewing my experience with SAP’s professional services more than the ease of integration. It was a painful experience over the past several months. It’s another project, in my opinion, we would have been better off completing on our own using internal resources and our own tool. It would have taken at most just as long and we’d have greater control and ability to expand later.