Concur – Business expense program

This is interesting as I have just reviewed Concur and a colleague has attended a days sales presentation near Frankfurt.

We were looking at it in terms of helping individuals to manage expense and tax affairs. The conclusion for us was if you are a medium, to large firm, with a centralised finance department for expense claims it would work as clearly everyone will be sending through in the same format.

Fundamentally though, it is just a prettier version of a decent spread sheet and scanning. Plenty of data and info to input.

One concern and I am not sure whether it is possible, is whether the system can be used offline or whether it is an online system. Didn’t get that answer…

We switched from SAP to Concur last year. It has some benefits in our set up with automatic credit card charge feed and e expense attachment simplifying expense report generation (but we also use Concur on line travel booking). Disadvantages in the way we are set up are the inability to attach more than one document (and the limitations on size and document type) to an expense. However by FAR my biggest frustration is the inability to match charges booked via Concur with approved vendors like Avis or Delta from my Amex statement. So every flight and car rental gets the “you have chosen an unapproved vendor – explain” error message until I select Avis or Delta from the drop down – something to do with fonts and capitalizations I’m told. Would seem like an easy fix to me (and of untold efficiency benefits across our North American travelers) but it seems not…..