Life saver! Easiest expense report I've ever done.
December 09, 2020

Life saver! Easiest expense report I've ever done.

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

Software Version

Standard

Modules Used

  • Expense
  • Travel

Overall Satisfaction with Concur Travel and Expense

My previous company used Concur Travel and Expense to manage travel as well as expenses. We had a team of consultants who would go to various client locations to sell/demo software, and another team traveled to implement software. We used it for travel policies, but the main purpose was for expense reports. If the expenses were travel-related and charged to our corporate card, they would automatically upload and match to the travel activity. I was on the implementation team and this was a huge time-saver for me.
  • If you charge an airline ticket to your card, the receipt automatically attaches to the flight.
  • You can easily upload expense receipts from your phone and it reads the information from the receipt.
  • It helps make sure you are following company travel policies, especially in relation to cost.
  • My company used a non-related accounting package so we had to import the invoices for payment. There were not a lot of options for file type to export which made it more difficult to import.
  • It was a bit of a learning curve to book travel. There are a lot of options, which is nice, but can also be confusing for a new user. It caused a few more support calls internally.
  • The automatic upload of receipts is nice, but you have to review them carefully as it sometimes misreads the date or amount.
  • It made it easier and quicker for employees to upload receipts. This reduced the follow-up by accounting to track down missing receipts.
  • Employees tended to submit their expense reports more quickly and not hold up the payroll staff.
  • Expenses were tracked more accurately so that we knew more precisely how much our standard trips cost.
  • It reduced a lot of the burnout to the employees who traveled. They reported that they hated coming back from a week-long trip and spending their weekend catching up on administrative tasks like preparing an expense report.
I have only used an old-fashioned time & expense billing program. Each expense would be entered as a separate line item. All details were manually entered. After that, I would have to smooth out receipts, tape them to pieces of paper, total each page, and make sure it matched up to what I typed into the billing program. My supervisor then had to look at each line and find the receipt that corresponded to that.

Concur differed because I almost never had to manually enter anything. I would occasionally have to fix a date or amount but that is all. The expense report with receipts would not have to be physically delivered to my supervisor; instead, it was electronically submitted and they could easily see the corresponding receipt for each expense line.
We used Microsoft Dynamics GP. I was not part of the export process but did help write the import. There was an ISV product already built to to the integration from Concur but we elected to write our own integration. From what I was told, there were not a lot of options for how the file could be export[ed], so the data was not in my preferred format. It also included a lot of extra information. However, all the needed information was there. The integration did not take that long to prepare and everything imported properly.
It did help us collect more information and be more accurate with the information we collected. It made travel less of a hassle. At times, I felt like we lost employees because travel just became a lot of extra work. We'd then have to train new people and have less qualified staff on average. I don't see that problem happening after the Concur implementation. The biggest feature the travelers enjoyed was the ability to simply snap a photo of their receipt, review, edit if necessary, and save.
Concur Travel and Expense has truly benefitted employees in terms of administration duties. Personally, I'd go on a week-long, and come home exhausted already. I'd then have to spend a couple of hours on Saturday or Sunday preparing and submitting my expense report. I'd also have to either go into the office to drop it off, or scan each page in and physically deliver the receipts later. At the same time, I was searching various websites to arrange my next trip or the trip after that, as I traveled almost every week.
For my business, we had a lot of employees who traveled. Even if we did not use the travel portion for policy management, booking, etc., we would get a lot of benefit out of the expense portion. Traveling for work was difficult before using Concur. I would shove receipts in various pockets of my bag and hope I got them all. If they were charged to the corporate card, I'd still get paid but it was a hassle. I'd gather receipts for travel, meals, taxi/cars, and other miscellaneous things. For this type of activity it worked very well.

I think it might be harder for places where employees make inventory purchases or purchases related to a large project. I'm not sure all the receipts are quickly available or would be tracked at the level they needed to be. For instance, it might be expenses that were done on a purchase order or a project purchase. I haven't used Concur for this so I'm not sure if it would work well.