We will soon be engaging with Concur to automate our expense reporting and I was wondering if any of you had some experiences with the company that you could share?
Can you tell me of your experiences with Concur?
Answers
It's a good tool when used properly. As far as a cost/benefit, make sure you have the volume to justify. A good Concur representative will be very clear on this. When you have a widely dispersed employee base, it can really save you time/effort. Make sure you don't short cut any controls.
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Proformative offers 400+ online business courses with free CPE, many on Expense Management.
We've used it for a few years and mostly like it. We love that it is accessible from anywhere, completely paperless and even has a mobile app that allows people to capture their receipts via photo and upload - it helps with timely expense submission. The only thing we don't like about it is that it lacks some customization that we would like with setting up expense codes. It also has a lot of powerful reporting as well - you can see who's actually viewed receipts before approving expenses, who is consistently submitting late, etc. Easy to implement as well and user friendly.
It depends on your needs, but after some adjustment period of a few months, it should work pretty well for you and be a significant improvement to an
I put in 2 different companies and have been pleased as a
We implemented Concur and I agree with all Carrie's comments above. I will say that compared to the other systems we've implemented (Host Analytics, Intacct) Concur feels very restrictive to me as a power-user/Super Admin. There are a lot of things you need to go to support to do for you (adding Expense Types being a surprising example).
The back-end of the system also strikes me as clunky compared to newer SaaS systems. Concur has been in the space for awhile, which might be a disadvantage on the back end from a
Concur Expense is a powerful, mature tool for expense reporting. It enables paperless processing, matching with e-receipts, automated imports of credit card charges, and intelligent auditing. User-configurable business rules support differentiated policy enforcement. It comes with mobile apps and supports multi-currency, VAT reclaim, and identification of duplicate expenses. Managers have complete, online visibility into expense reports and receipts. They OEM a powerful BI tool for reporting and analysis. Competitors have cheaper pricing, but Concur offers a tremendous value proposition. One caveat: if you must re-bill expenses, investigate their ability to tag expenses with project ID's, support approvals by PM's, and export sufficient details to your PSA system.
I can also attest to Jim's comments - Concur is very powerful and does everything listed. Another advantage is that many people have experience using Concur. I am a bigger fan as an end-user than I am as a super-admin.
Our company is looking at using this through the travel approval and online booking as well does anyone have experience with this?
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I find the travel piece more expensive than flights I can find myself. Our company implemented as a way to control costs, which only makes sense if your staff is out of control and requires babysitting. Having management approval and holding staff accountable for their last minute bookings or extravagant choices of flights would work just as well, in my opinion. I find the interface for travel books to be immature with the red and green flags.
However, I am in
I have implemented Concur for both booking travel and expense. Like many of these Software as a Service (SaaS) models, the complexity of the implementation is based on how much of the tools functionality you want to use. This is a powerful system and should have the volume to justify it. Pair this with an AMEX corporate card made for a very efficient travel and expense process. User acceptance is important. You should develop a key user group to participate in the implementation. All of this is predicated on compliance. If you have individuals who book travel outside of the system, this will decrease the return. The Concur produce is an excellent way to build in systemic controls to help with compliance, and they can be as flexible or as restrictive as you choose.
Would be happy to answer any followup questions you have.
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HI Nicole,
Good Day.
I need your help.
WE are implementing Concur for Expense part for our client. As we are already using SAP for our client for booking expenses.
We have two choices right now:
1) We book the trip in concur and rest all things like settlement of the trip, posting of the trip, accounting of the trip, reimbursement of the trip etc will happen in SAP (This is the current application which we are using.)
2)everything will happen in concur like trip booking, settlement, posting, but payment will be done in SAP.
Approach 1 is okay for us as we already have one web based functionality which is being used in a similar way since last 2 years.
In Approach 2:As everything is happening concur, it will require lots of interfaces to be mapped b/w SAP and Concur with huge amount of configurations in Concur itself.
Can you guide which approach is better?
Approach 2 requires lots of interfaces with SAP, so what all values need to be send to Concur from SAP.(expense types,
Thanks and Regards
Arpit
Can anyone tell me how to generate a report in Concur that are able to show all the expenses reports have been rejected by approver within a time period? Is it in somewhere of standard reports?
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To my knowledge there is no way to do this. We don't have managed reporting at this time though.
Let the onboarding team help you to set it up.
I agree with many of the posts above. My greatest frustration has been that tasks I have been able to complete as an Admin on other software require me to submit a case, get a quote, test, and then implemement. We also had a difficult time communicatiung with their support team. In written correspondence they are very impressive, however, many times when you ge them on the phone you realize they do not have a complete grasp of English.
We are looking to change our corporate credit cards and would like some suggestions as to who else can integrate their data into Concur to allow for the same seamless reporting as direct expenses. We are with Elan Visa now and very unhappy. Does anyone know of other credit cards that offer integration with/through Concur?
So our company just made the decision to NOT go with Concur but instead Certify. This is after we decided to move away from Expensify, and intergrate our travel booking and expense
Agree with Ken's comment above that with Concur being the mature player in the T/E space, they are becoming very clunky.
With Certify, we were able to get MUCH more competitive pricing and with a comparable feature set but with a more seamless UI experience.
Whereas Concur/Certify/Expensify do expenses and partner with a travel company (Egencia or whatever), Sillk would do both.
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Interesting Michael,
I've received a support alert just about every other morning for this past week about issues Concur is resolving. I have not had any issues reported from our user base, so they used a blanket approach.
I also received an email addressed to {FirstName}. {LastName}, which I then received an apology email for.
Though Concur's stock price is soaring they need to get on top of their game because as you pointed out there are many newer entrants who will erode their market share if they do not re-commit to being the best in the space.
Ken,
I have to agree all these alerts and support messages coming all the time is not generating a positive view of the company. We have however started with their travel expense reporting now and plan to implement their invoice management system later on this year.
Anders,
I understand - extending the rules and workflow to A/P is a very attractive option. We took a look at it, and are good with our current set up for the near-term but it does scale nicely in a way that a manual process cannot.
The ability to naturally upsell to existing customers who purchased a T&E product is part of what makes their model compelling to investors I am sure.
I don't want to be unfair. Concur works - extremely well. However they cannot rest on their laurels. If you did not use them for T&E, you would be open to exploring invoice management across a multitude of vendors, yes?
I wouldn't be surprised to read a HBR article in 10 years using Concur as a cautionary tale (disclaimer: I am obviously no expert, and I am being imaginative here).
It's a great product with "stickiness" but like any customer I expect constant improvement without spending a nickel more and I am attuned to information about other companies in the same space because who knows, I might be willing to try them out the next time I implement a T&E solution.
Ken
have used Concur for about a year now. only the Concur Expense, no booking.
my 2 cents:
1. very configurable. my company has over 9 global subs / currencies. all can be handled by Concur.
2. audit function is powerful. we have unique expense limits for meals and entertainment events. limits are all different based on expense location and event type. Concur audit function is able to auto check the limits and raise the warning flag, if needed.
3. people love the mobile apps, but the blackberry version seems to be less loved.
4. the tool could be further improved in terms of stability. almost every week, there is some sort of outage. thankfully, we haven't had any instances so far where people missed expense deadline due to outage.
5. usage interface, especially the web version, is cluttered. hard to find thing / font too small.
email me for any specific questions..
I am implementing Concur and have come across a situation for setting up Mobile phone expense claims. Can somebody help me in setting up audit rule so that user will not be allowed to make duplicate claim for the same expense.
We only used the expense reporting portion and it worked great. It is a powerful tool with great reporting capabilities. Make sure you compare it to other offerings.
Does anyone have experience with Concur's audit service?
Concur's audit service is great if you are willing to put in the time to set it up correctly. Then be ready. They operate on a black and white template. If something misses the mark by even $0.01, it will be rejected. We had some grief when we would make an adjustment to corporate policy and then couldn't have a conference call to coordinate the appropriate changes to the audit process fast enough.
We are a small start up with a few cards that are all run through one account. I want something simple that can be used to reconcile and code and account back to
I am the CEO of a startup software company and we are building a solution to immeasurably improve the existing expense reporting processes. We feel the present solutions may have missed the mark when it comes to the "centralized services" market and there is a significant marketplace need for a solution built to maximize expense reporting through centralized operations.
CPA’s, Administrative Assistants, and accounting teams, not to mention out-sourced accounting teams, all leverage the advantages gained by centralizing repetitive accounting and operations functions.
We have re-envision the work and process flows and are building new user tools so that centralized services teams will be provided solutions to help them maximize efficiencies, thus substantially lowering operating costs. We also believe our solutions improve overall data input and review quality improving company policy compliance and cost controls.
I would love to hear thoughts form this group on features you would like to see but are missing in existing solutions, and also hear about the best features that current provider already offer. thanks for your consideration and thoughts.
We have been using Concur for about 4 years. As an audit requirement, we asked Concur if we could download PDF's of each expense report & receipts for each payroll. We realize, we can print these per individual online, but we wanted all of them to file away. Our concern is that Concur may go out of business or we stop using their services. Then we no longer have access to all our expense reports. Have any of you asked for this information?
According to our IT dept who has been working with Concur, they cannot do this. They could provide us with a "data dump" if we left Concur, but then we would have to create our own database to read the data.
The other option is they can provide us with 2 files each pay. One would have all the reports. And one would have all the receipts. However, there would be no way to tie these to the employee (which would be pretty useless for us).
Finally, I am told we are too small to be invoiced or billed on account. Concur will only take payment via credit card for their services. We have about 100 employees and process about 150 expense reports each month. Does anyone else have this issue?
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We offer a similar solution and view that type of data as belonging to our customers so we make it easy for them to get it for their records and audit purposes whenever they want.
And we bill monthly unless customers prefer to pay less often (some choose quarterly, 6 mos, etc. but the majority prefer getting invoiced each month).
When we left Concur, we were also only provided a data dump. And yes, I agree that it is basically useless unless you are going to spend a lot of time putting the data back together (and then why have an expense reporting system). We were also only offered the chance to pay via automatic EFT. While some of their services are great, I found that learning the system was difficult and not intuitive for a new user. We switched to a smaller company and our bills have gone from $785/month to less than $200/month. To get this we lost some of the sophistication Concur offered, but for only 30 users we couldn't justify the extra expense. The new system almost needs no training to use.
We left Concur at the beginning of the year. I have been trying to get our data since then. Since we are no longer a client, they have no incentive to help me. I have nothing to support two years worth of expense reports after paying them close to $2,000 per month. We now use SmartData. It's a bit cumbersome, but it is free from MasterCard.
Long ago we have used Concur but we have been very satisfied with SutiExpense (http://www.sutisoft.com/sutiexpense/) It's fully featured, modern and extremely simple to use.
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