I travelled to Las Vegas last week for the Concur Fusion conference. One big theme was „The Connected Journey“, where Concur as a central tool connects the traveller and supporting teams with a variety of related vendors, tools and processes. So, using Concur myself, how connected was my trip?
Using the connections available to me, I definitely achieved an almost paper-free trip (and that includes electronic paper like PDFs handled manually) except for two receipts I had to hold for one minute each before disposing of them. Sure, given the size of our team we don’t use all gadgets the Concur ecosystem offers and the relatively „boring“ destination USA (no visa requirements, no natural disasters – thank you!, data roaming already in place) didn’t allow me to use the full arsenal available. However, it was still quite impressive looking back and realising how many integrations played along and made it a much easier experience for me. Particularly as most of them are so easy to set up (once you know ;-) ) that I barely remember doing it.
These are the apps and services integrating with Concur on my Journey to Concur Fusion (screenshots not all from original booking, but some are reproduced later):
- The Concur mobile app for booking my flights
- Tripit Pro collects all my bookings and creates my itinerary. It’s my best friend, when I’m out there: No printed intineraries any more. No copy&pasting of confirmation emails into my outlook calendar. Automated tracking of delays or other changes.
- Airbnb to book an appartment close to the venue. E-receipt automatically in Concur
- Uber to book a cab to the train station in London: e- receipt automatically in Concur
- Lyft for rides between my accommodation and the Concur Fusion venue: e-receipts automatically in Concur
- I had breakfast at Starbucks and paid with the Starbucks card connected to my Concur account: e-receipt automatically in Concur
- I bought some 4G data volume for my iPad from GigSky, where my account is connected to Concur. So, it asks me, whether I want the e- receipt to go into Concur.
- I still had a couple of paper receipts for meals and used the Expenseit app to create those expenses in Concur more efficiently
- As I am writing this blog waiting for the transfer between T3 and T5 at London Heathrow, my Tripit App notifies me that my connection to Paris is delayed. So I have time at my hands and schedule a call with my colleague Joerg. It needs to be noted that the official info screens at the airport annoucned the delay much later – I had the same experience before ar various airports with various airlines.
- Finally, it takes only a few minutes in the taxi to finish the expense report on the Concur mobile app.
And it’s worth mentioning: from the first booking to the submission of the expense report all has been done on mobile. For me that’s adding real value, as desk time is scarce, while waiting time or travel time, where I can’t use a laptop anyway, is much easier to find.
If you would like to find out how you can make your business trips more connected, more mobile, less paper-based and basically more efficient and stress free, please get in touch.
