Concur is designed to give you hand in keeping track of travel and expenses for your business. With travel comes expenses, and it can be hard keeping track of it all of yourself as well as your employees. If you’ve been complaining about how hard it is to manage and organize all of this data, Concur might be the solution for you. But let’s review how it works, and what type of businesses might benefit from it.
Overview
It can be a headache keeping track of all the myriad of expenses that accumulate during a business trip. Airfare, hotels, taxis, food, and small nickel and dime transactions can add up quickly. As the employee you want to make sure that you’re properly reimbursed for this, and as the owner you want to make sure you can claim as much as you can for deductions come tax time.
The Claim
Concur claims to be able to make heads or tails out of your expense tracking and reporting for when you and your employees travel. They say you can get rid of the old fashioned way of keeping everything logged in spreadsheets and just use their software. They also claim that you can stop using paper receipts to keep track of purchases and expenses, and just have everything digitally logged when you use your credit card. They also say they help you see the bigger picture via graphs and data reports so you can better understand what’s going on within your organization.
The Cost
It’s $8 per user, per month to use Concur and all of its features.
The Commitment
The system is set up to be user friendly, but it will require a feeling out process in order to get familiar with how it works and all of the features it contains. It would be a good idea to set aside an afternoon to immerse yourself in it and set everything up. If you have a medium sized business, you might want to consider delegating this task, as the more people you have in your organization the longer it’s going to take to have it set up and working properly.
Evaluation
We like that they give you a fully operational 30 day trial. It lets you get into the system and start using it without the pressure of feeling like you have to use it because you paid for it. You’re able to customize things for your specific business, which is great because businesses are like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike. You can also add a credit card to it, so that it can automatically track and report charges that are made on it.
Final Concur Review
We’re giving Concur our Thumbs Up review and rating. The user interface is pretty advanced and user friendly, allowing you to drag and drop the different items you feel are most important right into your account dashboard. You can quickly and easily create expense reports, view credit card charges, and approve and process reports.
But the reason we’re giving it our approval is that it lets you analyze the data. This can be crucial for your business, as it can help you identify where the money is going on these trips, and when it comes time to cut expenses, you’ll be able to target specific transactions, or problem employees.
Also, the apps for the various smartphones are essential for keeping track of things while on the go. Without it, you’d have to find a computer to log onto, making it rather inconvenient, and easy to forget to enter transactions.
Our Recommendation
The free trial gets you access to everything, it’s not limited by what you can do or how many users you want to add. You can take the full amount of time to decide if it’s working for your business. If you’ve got a lot of travel booked for you and your employees over the next 30 days this is a great way to put it through its paces and see if it saved you time and a headache. If not, do nothing because you don’t need a credit card to sign up. If you like it it’s really easy to subscribe from within your user account.
I have worked for the same company for almost three decades. I had never had an expense report turned down or returned in all of these years until the Concurs experience. I have been forced to use Concurs for the past sixteen months, spend over 60 nights a year on the road. I imagine that this program was conceived and written in hell by imbecilic demons who are particularly sadistic. My job is by nature stressful, but now dealing with this program and having reviewers in other countries who have no ideal what I do for a living pull my strings is the most stressful part of my job. I would not wish this on anyone.
Worst thing I think is having no one to talk to, to explain the unique responsibilities of my job. They can never imagine why I spend money and I assume there are a large number people all over the world interacting with me because they never get the drift; have to battle, submit and re-submit repeatedly to get my money back.
I travel an enormous amount both within and outside of Australia. My company has just switched to Concur. After the teething problems we now have everything working…
Of course most tax invoices require some form of manual correction especially dealing with duplicate entries and incorrect dollar denominations.
A4 sized tax invoices can’t be photographed successfully with a phone and must be scanned & emailed.
My monthly expenses, that used to take a few hours, now take a day (or more) and I can no longer do everything from home or my hotel room.
Even if it worked as claimed, Concur would still be a lot slower (and frustrating) than our old method.
Concur is absolute JUNK! The website and the phone app often times fail to link expenses which is the supposed crux of the system to make it user friendly. In reality, you end up throwing away receipts then having to fill out a “Lost Receipt Affidavit” or you’ll have duplicate entries that you have to manually merge. The most common problem is after logging a receipt on your phone app you still have to log in to your lap top to manually edit each receipt for “Business Purpose” or the date or it prefers to save a meal as Dinner instead of Breakfast or Lunch. Compared to our last system, I spend on average 5X longer each month completing expense reports. I have even had our accounting department comment that they were sold a false bill of goods with this system. Avoid at all cost.
Concur is very very tedious to use. I takes a lot of time to input the information as the interface is terribly slow.
Concur travel management is pure JUNK. I am a part time FEMA team leader and just came back from a 7 week deployment to Texas. My team spends hours and hours on this allegedly user friendly system not only in trying to input information into the “Child TA” but also in creating their final vouchers which is a real nightmare.
The last system FEMA used prior to CONCUR took me about 15 minutes to complete accurately. I could even do my whole team in about 2 hours.
FEMA assigns large staffs to just try to help us through this nightmare, to no avail. Each time there is a new quirk that bounces the TA or voucher back.
Sorry for the ranting on this subject but I believe it borders on being criminal. As a retired Command Officer for a large state police agency, I would sure like to see an investigation into this issue and find out who got their pockets lined with this contract.
I’ve been looking something like this for some time. Looks pretty sleek and easy to use. I was looking for something like an app to handle this stuff and hopefully for less than eight bucks a month but this looks pretty robust. I already signed up for a trial and will be putting it through the paces in the coming days… thanks for posting this article.