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At my old job, I was jealous of people at other companies who got to use Concur. Whatever Concur's flaws may be, the system we had was obviously worse. "Wow,

At my old job, I was jealous of people at other companies who got to use Concur. Whatever Concur's flaws may be, the system we had was obviously worse. "Wow, you take a photo with your phone and it goes in an app? Wish we had an app. Instead I have to submit it on a website, print the cover page as a PDF, collect all my receipts as further PDFs, merge the PDFs, and then send them via email with a single PDF attachment." It had to be a single PDF, the system would reject the email if it had more than one attachment. Given it was a computer program not a human at the other end, I never worked out why we had to send it via email, as opposed to just uploading it via a web form. At least I knew enough to merge the cover page PDF and receipt PDFs into one using Ghostscript. A lot of less technical people, they'd print them all out then scan them back in.

jvanderbot 4y ago
At one of my two career employers, to create an electronic deposit for your paychecks you had to: 1. Email payroll asking for the right form (an excel sheet would arrive via email) 2. fill out that excel sheet that had no validation at all, just formatting. you enter your bank info, amount, etc. If you needed more lines, you had to "attach another sheet". 3. Then you printed that, 4. signed it, 5. scanned it, and 6. emailed it to payroll@the_company, 7. who would call you and tell you what you did wrong, and then 8. they'd just do what you said over the phone anyway. Yes, the excel sheet existed for no reason other than to align your typed text on the resulting printed page properly. It of course had giant "Do not edit any cells" on the top in red.
- doktorhladnjak 4y ago
  Reminds me of the time I had to fill out an expense report to get reimbursed by a company who had flown me out for an interview. It all had to be done in Excel. Unfortunately my bank account number was very long, which caused Excel to round down the last two digits. My reimbursement went into someone else’s account who then flagged it to the bank before we got it all straightened out.

jvanderbot 4y ago

At one of my two career employers, to create an electronic deposit for your paychecks you had to: 1. Email payroll asking for the right form (an excel sheet would arrive via email) 2. fill out that excel sheet that had no validation at all, just formatting. you enter your bank info, amount, etc. If you needed more lines, you had to "attach another sheet". 3. Then you printed that, 4. signed it, 5. scanned it, and 6. emailed it to payroll@the_company, 7. who would call you and tell you what you did wrong, and then 8. they'd just do what you said over the phone anyway. Yes, the excel sheet existed for no reason other than to align your typed text on the resulting printed page properly. It of course had giant "Do not edit any cells" on the top in red.

doktorhladnjak 4y ago
Reminds me of the time I had to fill out an expense report to get reimbursed by a company who had flown me out for an interview. It all had to be done in Excel. Unfortunately my bank account number was very long, which caused Excel to round down the last two digits. My reimbursement went into someone else’s account who then flagged it to the bank before we got it all straightened out.