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Good for simple claims but need a lot of improvements
August 09, 2022

Good for simple claims but need a lot of improvements

Mo El-Haj | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Expense Management
  • Travel
  • Invoice Processing

Overall Satisfaction with Webexpenses

I use Webexpenses to claim expenses for work-related trips. It addresses the problem of avoiding doing manual form filling to claim expenses and so far it's doing this fine but with some issues. I have been using it for years now to claim expenses and I've been witnessing the changes year after year. They added ways to automatically detect receipts and parse them by extracting information such as the amount paid, the currency and the dates. It has some other great features, for example matching the receipts with the claim item I'm creating, and that saves a bit of time. On the other hand it has some drawbacks as for example it is slow even when I'm using it in office where we have super-fast internet. The website feels heavy, and sometimes it crashes without any explanation, it'll just say "something went wrong."

The other issue that I face and it makes my claim process hectic the matching process, it makes a lot of mistakes that I need to correct manually that takes a lot of time. They provide an option where you can upload a number of receipts and then it'll allow you to insert information about the receipt manually, this one confuses me a lot as since they have an automatic parser, why do they ask us to insert the information manually. That takes a significant amount of time and when done you still have to create each claim by hand and that's when it shows there is a matching receipt. I totally don't understand how that is useful, I could just create claims and match the receipts to them to avoid having to do the manual insertion twice.

Finally, Webexpenses website is so unfriendly when it comes to using it on tablets and mobile phones, they literally kept the same website and never adapted it to work with smart devices, I find that so annoying.
  • Creation of items is smooth.
  • Going through historical claims runs fine.
  • Adding in receipts also works fine with some glitches.
  • They definitely need to work on the way we upload receipts and add them to claims.
  • The forms need reformation, they are so old style, too many and a lot of those form entries do not make sense.
  • Receipt prediction doesn't work well.
  • Receipt parsing is problematic and works with a small number of receipt styles.
  • Improve website speed and loading time.
  • Make the website mobile and tablet friendly.
  • It helps in saving time sometimes.
  • Most of the time it doesn't save time at all and there is a lot to read and fill in for very simple claims (e.g. a cup of coffee).
  • I really don't like the fact that the website takes ages to load or to show details about claims and items.
  • Every time I travel I think about the time I'm going to spend filling the forms on Webexpenses.
As in my previous comments the website is not very usesable. The only way to solve that is to start fresh by creating a different app-like website that makes the life of their users easier. Nowadays, there are many mobile apps that can read receipts on the fly (e.g. by just taking a picture) but webexpenses still follows the old school process of keeping hold of paper receipts, go back home, take pictures of each one of them, emailing the pictures to yourself, then uploading them to WebEx in order to start claiming your receipts amount back. Seriously painful process. On top of that, our claims get rejected over silly excuses (e.g. didn't specific the number of people), I find that one to be unnecessary unless I state I'm travelling with someone else. If you give WebEx a try you'll totally understand what I mean. It's like using a website created in the 90's really old school, too slow and heavy. I wish the university could move into a different application as this one is very frustrating and sometimes I just don't bother adding in all receipts as it takes a lot of time to do so. It's 2022 and we still can't claim expenses using mobile devices!
I have never contacted Webexpenses customer support apart from the ones at the University finance office. The only support we get is through the financing team at the University. Most of the time they are fine and they don't really make our lives hard, but sometimes they really pick on small things and they keep referring that to Webexpenses policy. E.g. we are to provide itemized receipts of what we had on our meals, which makes it really difficult for us as in many countries, you are lucky if you just get a receipt showing the total amount you paid for. Very few places give you an itemised invoice. My recent claim has been rejected for that, saying that I'm not allowed to provide bank statement invoices that show what I spend in a food place. That was really annoying as the places I ate at in Spain don't provide invoices so I relied on my bank statement to prove my spending and to know that is not allowed just suddenly is very frustrating as my claim has been rejected. So far my experience using Webexpenses has not been great and the customer support (basically the University staff are not making it a pleasant experience).
Yes, I use it for claim submissions but as I explained before it has not been great. In reality it automates the process of uploading the reading receipts but there is a huge amount of manual work done on our side as users, we have to first upload the receipts then add details for each of them, then create a claim for each receipt and again insert information about that particular claim, then the automation system will match the receipt I inserted with the claim, which is not very useful to be honest.
It doesn't meet my expected requirements, although it tries to. My expectations are a fast reliable system that doesn't crash so often. A system that can make my life easy, save me time and make my claim process easy enough. So far Webexpenses does the opposite. I don't understand why the university insists on using it.
During my time at the University, I have never used any other products as the University has always used Webexpenses. I have also never used other products outside Lancaster University as in my last job we used a manual form and to be honest that was much easier than using Webexpenses.

Do you think Webexpenses delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Webexpenses's feature set?

No

Did Webexpenses live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Webexpenses go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Webexpenses again?

No

In my recent claim, I uploaded more than 20 receipts, to my surprise the system asked me to add in information by hand for each one of them rather than detect that automatically. I spent two hours doing that and when finished it asked me to create a claim for each receipt, that baffles me as I expected it to do that automatically why would I waste two hours inserting information yet to be asked to do that all over again.

The other scenario was the receipt prediction process, when you create a claim it starts to suggest receipts that match the information you inserted (mainly the date and amount) but that works badly as when I'm on a business trip most of my receipts will be on the same day, so the prediction system suggests many of them, and to make life even harder you need to hover on each receipt one by one to maximise it in order to know if it's the right receipt to select or not. Doesn't sound very smart to me.

I tried to do the claims once on my mobile phone, and that was impossible, the page size doesn't adapt to mobile phone screen size meaning it doesn't fit and you will have to keep scrolling both horizontally and vertically to get all the information needed, but seriously trying to fill in information using a mobile device is not possible.

Finally, the tool tip text provided doesn't even show up completely even on big screens, and some of those tool tip texts only appear if you click on them. For example it's hard to know which Meal Band the country you visited belongs to unless you click on each of the 5 bands and read the list of countries in each one of them. Again another waste of time. The whole website need recreated to make it useable.