Concur has been part of European enterprise software giant SAP for more than a year now. SAP has stopped selling their home-grown cloud solution for travel and expense and announced Concur as their go-forward solution, whilst the on-premise product is merely being kept alive. This has led to a steep increase in Concur customer numbers in EMEA and to SAP seriously investing into the solution’s capabilities in general and to cover European requirements in particular. So, if you are using Concur in North America, this is a good time to consider a European rollout.
Hold on a minute… I might be misleading our American friends here by re-enforcing a common misconception. You could actually argue that there is no such thing as a „European“ rollout. Only a Spanish rollout, a German rollout, a UK one,… you name it. Because the one unifying characteristic on Europe is its diversity. Stories of US corporates failing in Europe first time round because they open an office in London and thinking that they’ve ticked Europe are abundant. Even in the HR systems industry, the otherwise successful founder Aneel Bhusri has managed this feat twice: first with Peoplesoft and then again with Workday, allowing SAP to take a comfortable EMEA market lead with SuccessFactors.
Admirable as Aneel may be in many respects, I don’t want to lead you down the same bumpy path, and so here are a few exemplary points to illustrate what kind of diversity you’ll be able to enjoy for your European Concur Rollout:
1) Per Diems
My country of birth, Germany, may be admired for many things, but lean regulation is not one of them. You may be aware that the standard procedure to reimburse for meals is by using per diems rather than capturing receipts and using actual cost. The good thing is: the number of receipts is reduced dramatically. But trust a German tax legislator to find ways to make this complicated. Not only is there a huge table with the tax free per diem rates by number of hours and per country – in many cases it’s even per city. And that’s not even touching the rules of reducing per diems when meals are available, special procedures about hotel breakfasts, and the definition of which country’s rate to use in case of cross border travel.
You’ll come across per diems in many European countries and you’ll be surprised how many different ways you can deal with them. Whilst Austria keeps close to German regulations, Estonia requires you to pay them before the actual trip and the German Federal government sector is a different beast all together, making „normal“ German regulations look benign. Concur has long struggled with per diems and in some cases it still feels clumsy for users and there are still gaps for some special cases. But it has come a long way, and when the mobile app is covering them, as expected very soon, one major European hurdle will have been overcome.
Against popular belief you can even come across per diems in the UK. Whilst the normal process is to reimburse actual cost according to receipt, per diems can be used in two cases:
– Replacing receipt based payments by a negotiated per diem rate
– Paying a tax free per diem of GBP 5.00 for domestic travel and GBP 10.00 for overseas travel.
2) Means of transport and geography
It’s the nature of European geography that makes its typical trips quite different from North American ones.
For one, major cities are often close enough to each other to use ground transport rather than air travel. In many countries you have a very good rail network, and so trains are the preferred mode of transport. In others, there is a preference for car travel – and whether that’s typically a company car or not depends to a large extend on how much each country’s tax system subsidizes company cars or encourages personal car usage by generous tax free mileage allowances.
And then the size of most countries makes cross border trips short enough for ground transportation in many cases. Cross-border travel in itself is a European feature: a 4 hour road trip, which wouldn’t even get you out of your state in many cases in the US, could get you from Amsterdam to the French city of Metz, going through 4 countries. So even for cross-border travel, you’d use trains very often. I go to Brussels or Paris quite often from London, but I never fly there because I can get from centre to centre in 2:15 or 2:30 hours on the Eurostar train. That means you need to integrate train travel into your Concur booking engine to cover the probable most popular mode of transport. That’s for the Eurostar as the only European train available through GDS – it’s actually coming under “flights”. But for other train travel you need to look at integration of local train companies like SNCF in France or aggregators like Trainline in the UK. Whilst Trainline has a full standard integration, the largest European transport company “Deutsche Bahn” of Germany has a very limited integration requiring some workarounds.
You’ll often find travel policies discriminating against air travel. This is because domestic air travel is quite rare and in many countries doesn’t make any sense at all, so flight bookings often require special approval.
There are also interesting differences in patterns of travel depending on a country’s geography. You have highly centralised countries like France where everything is focused on Paris, and highly decentralised ones like Germany where Berlin may be relevant for federal government, but business is distributed across many regional centres like Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, etc – and then countries like the UK, where London is the major centre of business and government, but also with significant regional centres such as Birmingham, Manchester, or Edinburgh.
3) Taxation
There is a variety of rules for tax free reimbursement and how anything beyond these limits is taxed. This primarily affects how expenses are treated in payroll, so a payroll interface good enough for one country may not be sufficient for another country (e.g. some countries it”s enough to import taxable expenses into payroll, in others you also need tax free ones to flow into statutory reporting through payroll.
As for VAT (Value added tax): it’s not just the rate that differs between countries. Whilst train travel doesn’t carry VAT in the UK, in Germany the VAT rate even depends on the length of the trip (as it does for taxi rides). The UK differentiates between restaurant food, hot take away and cold take away to determine VAT, and also between on street and off street parking.
Germany has a set tax free rate for personal car usage per km, but it’s increased for extra travellers and decreased if you use your motor cycle or bike instead of a car. The UK uses miles rather than km, and the rate goes down above 10,000 miles per year.
4) Preferred vendors and apps
You’ll find that many apps integrating with Concur are useless in the most of Europe. Even though they are advertised by Concur to work in all regions, in many cases the vendors simply don’t have any content in Europe (e.g. the Lyft App). This is certainly changing as more local apps start integrating with Concur (e.g. German Transfer).
Other app integrations like Starbucks work in principal, but it’s missing all VAT data on the e-receipts which makes it pretty much useless. This is just as well, because expensing a cup of coffee is not a European thing to do and that’s not only referring to countries using per diems. So all those Concur sales reps boasting about Starbucks integration do get it wrong imo: if anything European customers would see it as a problem if it encourages employees to claim more petty expenses. An app like Velocity is a much better case. Unfortunately it’s not yet very widespread (really good coverage only in LA, San Francisco and London).
Global hotel deals sound tempting and your procurement department will probably want to go for it at all cost. But to get the best deal, it will often be necessary to look at local vendors e.g. for the low end of the market, you’ll look at Travelodge in the UK, Formule 1 in France and independent hotels in Poland or Germany. As for hotel aggregators, booking.com works everywhere, but to get the best choice, best deals and better booking experience in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, you won’t get past HRS (“Hotel Reservation Service”).
5) Culture and normal practice
There are many differences, where you can’t spot a good reason why they exist other than tradition and culture. You usually have more of a “them and us” culture between upper management and the workforce in the UK, and even more so in France than you have in Sweden or Germany. That drives many of the processes around audit and approval.
There are also large differences in the adoption of paperless processes. Even though EU legislation makes them perfectly legal, some tax offices are more suspicious than others and some companies shy away from that discussion by keeping paper – a very expensive choice.
We’ve also experienced big differences in appetite for self-booking and even acceptance of Travellers capturing their own expenses. As a rule of thumb, you hit more resistance in Eastern Europe than in Scandinavia, Germany, Benelux or the UK. Even in Estonia, otherwise a powerhouse of modern technology for day to day activities, we struggled quite a bit in one project.
6) Languages
Don’t assume everybody will just be happy with a user interface in English. That might work for your middle management, but not for all construction workers or shop assistants. So you need to translate the solution if you want acceptance and self service adoption from the whole workforce.
Did you know?
In the 28 EU countries alone, there are 24 official languages (plus 4 semi-official languages and 42 minority languages you can probably get away without). The EU estimates that 51% of the population understand English. that’s probably higher, when looking at the working population only, but still makes it clear that you won’t achieve anywhere near 100% adoption, if you rely on English only. And that’s not even considering non-EZ countries like Russia, where the average level of English is often even lower.
So What?
So, what does all this mean? I certainly don’t want to discourage you from running a European Concur Rollout. There is much to be gained from it, and I daresay the majority of the workforce is hungry for a more modern, more mobile, more empowering solution. Just don’t assume everything that works for the US will work in Europe (most Europeans will be less forgiving about all the small glitches you still find in Concur, so allow time for testing) and brace yourself for some serious diversity in legislation, transport and culture.
You need to strike the right balance between localisation and standardisation. The best way to achieve this is to define an international template as a framework to be applied in all countries with enough room to comply efficiently with local legislation and to allow for other local solutions, where they are really necessary, but guaranteeing a level of standardisation to allow for a quick rollout and low maintainance cost.
The fastest implementation I’ve been involved in so far was one across 9 countries in 3 months for Travel & Expense – and that’s not being preceeded by a pilot country. It could only work, because of polcies and processes were standardised as far as possible (I still would recommend to allow more time, if at all possible). So do sit down together before you start and find a great process aligned with the culture of your organisation: then you have the best chances of adopting it gloablly with local amenedments restricted to legal requirements.
The Perfect Trip will look different from Le Voyage Partfait, Fullkomna Resan, and Die Perfekte Reise. That’s where we see our value as a consulting partner: helping you to navigate European diversity whilst maintaining an appropriate level of standardisation, and making the transition easier for your local subsidiaries with some on-site face2face help as and when required. Just get in touch.
