4 ms·

Workday Financials is a meaningful competitor. I used SAP Concur at my last job and "horribly wicked thing" is accurate. It reminds me of that "evil UX" thing t

Workday Financials is a meaningful competitor. I used SAP Concur at my last job and "horribly wicked thing" is accurate. It reminds me of that "evil UX" thing that was making the rounds a year or two ago.

tristor 4y ago
The sad thing is that Concur used to be great. It was acquired by SAP and then "SAPified", now it's a nightmare. But it does /exactly/ what the bean counters want, which is to mindlessly and stupidly apply policies against business travelers who are just trying to get their job done.
- patja 4y ago
  the funny thing about Concur is its origin was the internal expense reporting front end that Microsoft had built on top of their own SAP implementation.
  - psidium 4y ago
    wait do you have more info on that or a link? never heard of it
    - patja 4y ago
      Andrew Dent and Elena Donio were consultants on the internal MSFT SAP implementation. They took what they learned about building friendly procurement and expense reporting SAP front end apps to Concur.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Concur the software is OK though not great. What is distinctly often not OK is the mandatory fields that companies want, often arbitrary travel policies, and often needlessly nit-picky auditing. If putting in an expense report into Concur typically sailed through unless something was clearly wrong, missing reasonable documentation, or was significantly out of policy, Concur would mostly be fine.
  - nradov 4y ago
    My expense reports in Concur almost always sail through. It shows you warnings if you're missing a receipt or something.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      For me it's stupid audit stuff. The date entered as the transaction is a date sooner than it posted and stupid stuff like that. I've mostly trained myself but I still get stuff bounced for little things like that. I've mostly trained myself to follow all the nit-picky rules carefully but I still miss from time to time. As I say, it's mostly not Concur itself which usually warns you of missing fields/receipts.
    - joegahona 4y ago
      For me the real pain was paying vendors or freelancers. They all had to be input as an additional vendor, which is reasonable, but there were dozens of fields within each vendor, many of which were esoteric in they're labeling (likely a fault of implementation on our side). Then I would get a rejection via email that a particular field wasn't filled out (why wasn't it a required field?), and it was often hard to find where to input that field -- very unintuitive. I think I even had to go through a company admin once to add an associated email address to a vendor. Beyond that, just the philosophy of creating a "purchase order" to pay a UX researcher who did 10 hours of work over three months seemed goofy -- purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid.
      - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
        > purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid How can you pay an invoice for a service / item you haven’t purchased? If you buy a service from a supplier, you raise a po, you pay an invoice based on the po. As a supplier, I always ask for a po.
        ghaff 4y ago
hef19898 4y ago
In addition to finance SAP covers everything from production over procurement to finance, HR, sales, MRO, logistics and everything in between.
- joegahona 4y ago
  Yeah, I conflated "SAP" with "Concur" -- my bad.

tristor 4y ago

The sad thing is that Concur used to be great. It was acquired by SAP and then "SAPified", now it's a nightmare. But it does /exactly/ what the bean counters want, which is to mindlessly and stupidly apply policies against business travelers who are just trying to get their job done.

patja 4y ago
the funny thing about Concur is its origin was the internal expense reporting front end that Microsoft had built on top of their own SAP implementation.
- psidium 4y ago
  wait do you have more info on that or a link? never heard of it
  - patja 4y ago
    Andrew Dent and Elena Donio were consultants on the internal MSFT SAP implementation. They took what they learned about building friendly procurement and expense reporting SAP front end apps to Concur.
ghaff 4y ago
Concur the software is OK though not great. What is distinctly often not OK is the mandatory fields that companies want, often arbitrary travel policies, and often needlessly nit-picky auditing. If putting in an expense report into Concur typically sailed through unless something was clearly wrong, missing reasonable documentation, or was significantly out of policy, Concur would mostly be fine.
- nradov 4y ago
  My expense reports in Concur almost always sail through. It shows you warnings if you're missing a receipt or something.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    For me it's stupid audit stuff. The date entered as the transaction is a date sooner than it posted and stupid stuff like that. I've mostly trained myself but I still get stuff bounced for little things like that. I've mostly trained myself to follow all the nit-picky rules carefully but I still miss from time to time. As I say, it's mostly not Concur itself which usually warns you of missing fields/receipts.
  - joegahona 4y ago
    For me the real pain was paying vendors or freelancers. They all had to be input as an additional vendor, which is reasonable, but there were dozens of fields within each vendor, many of which were esoteric in they're labeling (likely a fault of implementation on our side). Then I would get a rejection via email that a particular field wasn't filled out (why wasn't it a required field?), and it was often hard to find where to input that field -- very unintuitive. I think I even had to go through a company admin once to add an associated email address to a vendor. Beyond that, just the philosophy of creating a "purchase order" to pay a UX researcher who did 10 hours of work over three months seemed goofy -- purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid.
    - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
      > purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid How can you pay an invoice for a service / item you haven’t purchased? If you buy a service from a supplier, you raise a po, you pay an invoice based on the po. As a supplier, I always ask for a po.
      - ghaff 4y ago

hef19898 4y ago

In addition to finance SAP covers everything from production over procurement to finance, HR, sales, MRO, logistics and everything in between.

joegahona 4y ago
Yeah, I conflated "SAP" with "Concur" -- my bad.