We are a global non profit with about 250 employees with corporate credit cards and expense reporting responsibilities. We have heavy international travel and primarily use VISA in USD (from Wells Fargo) or GBP (from Barclays). We need a system that requires our staff to be accountable, allows for multiple currencies and VAT reporting, project/program allocation, web based and smart phone app usability, and integration into Oracle R12 with a very complex chart of accounts. Getting our sales and business development staff to comply with our current policy is difficult since they are so often out of whatever country in which they are based. Therefore we need something easy for them to use wherever they are and also remind them forcefully, if necessary that they are not compliant. We met with Concur and like what they offer, at least the sales pitch but it is pricey. Our CEO and COO want other options. Are there any other options that will do what we need? Does anyone have experience with expense reporting solutions that may work for us?
Corporate Expense Reporting Software
Answers
R12 will allow you to handle the multiple currencies, you may need a consultant with that specialty to help you set up the multiple ledgers correctly.
Concur is a great product. It's really the only one out there that once implemented will help you to reduce the number of people touching the process, so credit the cost of that out of your estimate. Once Concur is mapped to your GL, it's essentially going to revolutionize the processing.
Sounds like you have received the correct advice. All you need to do is make the right decision.
BTW, Expensify also handles multi-currency. They state they have Oracle Sales Cloud Integration. Just another system that MAY provide you with the results you need, but then again, it may not.
In a PPOE, I implemented Concur for a service-oriented company with international travellers. Direct savings came from efficiencies in processing, reducing the time between expense and G/L, and faster G/L update through daily batch files. We were beginning to mine the resource of data which is captured along the way, and I have to say I've seen friendlier report generators, but simply eliminating huge wads of paper and gaining access to all the information on them, is itself a major benefit. Currency translation was no problem: travellers simply entered their expenses in the local currency, or the expense was imported from an e-receipt or the like. Concur did an acceptable job of the conversion, a significant factor in its acceptance by the staff.
I implemented a system (similar to your needs) for fast growing land use consulting firm based in New England a few years back. I was the Senior
We currently use Expensify which has a feed from our corporate credit card platform that is offered by US Bank. And we also use it for some of our non-corporate card holders as well. It handles a lot of different currencies, has audit trail for approvals, and ability to set different expense reporting policies.
We went with Gorilla Expense after looking at Concur and Expensify. Gorilla did everything well - project allocation, customer allocation, VAT, multi-currency, setting up policies etc. We integrated our Amex with them but I remember that they handled VISA as well.
As a former Concur user in my previous job, I can say that the Gorilla application is orders of magnitude better than Concur from a usability standpoint. Very easy to use, clean interface and not buggy. Our remote users love it. For the
We use Kepion for our expense reporting and allocations. We do a lot of expense tracking and planning for our company, which tied to our SAP G/L system overseas. They provided us with a flexible BI capabilities where we can filter by different geos, depts and drill down to the expense line items. Also we are also able to run what-if scenarios on different projections and set targets for each of our field offices. As far as pricing, we were very happy with both the implementation and licensing costs.
Cheri, nobody likes doing expense reports and there’s always a balance to be had between trying to make them “easy” and ensuring compliance to company policy. In my experience, a company’s T&E reimbursement policy rules are more often what makes filling out an expense report painful versus the Expense Report Automation software you choose. In addition you should consider carefully the costs/benefits to additional services such as payments and audits of your expense reports. One other concern from reading your post is that your current selection of corporate card provider may limit your ability to integrate fully (transaction imports and card payments), so for maximum benefit, you will likely need to consider changing your corporate card program/provider.