Changes in the Concur Travel & Expense Solution
You may have read articles from me about Concur Travel & Expense before. They may have talked about the dramatic improvement for T&E processes, the project management pitfalls that stop many customers from achieving them or all kinds of technology innovations. Very often, I would have shown the T&E process we are using at iProCon and the majority of EU customers would have asked: „How do they do this? We don’t seem to have all these fancy features.“
2016 is THE Year to Start Using Concur in Europe (update: 16th August 2016)
The reason for this: the majority of EU customers have their Concur instance on the European data centre, where App integrations were very limited. This is going to change and together with a whole bunch of further innovations this makes 2016 the year to move to Concur for European organisations.
If you are live with Concur already, you are probably set for a quantum leap, when you look at the new features
If you are already live with Concur – even on a US data centre – it’s almost certainly worthwhile to re-visit your scope and design to establish how you can get much more value out of your Concur solution.
Some of the New Features That Will Make Your Mouth Water
So here is a list if features we identified as real value-add or drivers of efficiency. They all have been or will be made available in 2016 either globally or for the EU data centre:
Triplink: Integrated Direct Booking
Triplink has been made available in Europe earlier this year. It’s a big story, but in a nutshell, it allows you to book directly on vendor websites (e.g. Lufthansa) and still get the data into your Concur system automatically and checked against your policy. You even have your negotiated rates available. With Lufthansa, one of the largest European players is an early Triplink partner available soon — they even charge >10 Pounds less per ticket, because there is no GDS fee involved.
Integration of Triplink Partners in Europe will be a bit slower than in the US, but it’s worthwhile to start early with partners like Captain Train and AirBnB to expand as you go along.
3rd Party App Integration for e-Receipts
This is one of the biggest benefits for me personally. So far, as a customer on the EU data centre you would have seen nothing or very little (e.g. Airbnb) in the Concur App centre (depending on whether you were subscribed to Triplink or not). This is going to change in August 2016 (postponed from June). The integration with 3rd Party apps and services opens a host of opportunities to make your travellers‘ lives easier and also drive efficiency in the back-office. One on my favourites are e-reciepts. For connected apps (Uber and other taxi apps, Velocity restaurant payment, Gigsky data roaming to name but a few) users don’t have to do anything for the e-receipt to pop up in Concur and create an expense item, which they only need to amend with some extra information such as business reason.
Further 3rd Party Apps and Services
There is more in the App centre than e-receipts. Whether it’s a roaming cost warning service, airport parking, or an app to help you to deal with Jet Lag: you can decide what to switch on for your travellers to use.
Expenseit: Automating Paper Based Expenses
The Expenseit app has been around for some time, but will now be optimised for non-US formats and other languages as well. Take a picture of a paper receipt and within minutes it will come back with the basic fields pre-populated. Review, amend, submit and then the expense gets created in Concur automatically.
Breaking News: Concur App centre available in EU Datacentre from 12th August 2016
It’s available now. Apps will be added over time. In week one, e-receipts weren’t available yet, but are announced for the not too distant future
Improvements in the Mobile App
This is not restricted to Europe, but to some extend more relevant for countries using per diems. Until March 2016, the mobile app had two big gaps:
- It couldn’t deal with per diems
- the request module was not available in mobile
Both have now been closed, so the scope for mobile usage has increased significantly.
Re-Billing Expenses to Customers
This is relevant for all organisations, who bill expenses to customers. Typically Engineering, Professional Services or Universities. But we’ve seen it in all industries – even for intra-company cross charging. Few Concur customers know there is an add on to automate this tedious process: it pulls data from Concur and creates billing statements with all relevant information including receipt images. So far only available in the US, but iProCon is currently piloting it for Europe.
The New Concur-SAP Integration is Here!
With the huge SAP customer base in Europe, an enhanced and easy to use integration is something customers have been keen of for some time. Now it’s here. We are currently testing it as part of the „Early Adopter Program“ and Q3 2016 will see it made available for all customers („General Availability now expected in September). Check this article for the scope of the new native SAP-Concur integration.
I’d almost go as far as saying: „If your employees don’t say T&E is the favourite part of their job by the end of this year, you’ve done something wrong“. Almost ;-)
Improved Language support (update)
In July, Concur started to make key knowledge base articles available in German, French and Spanish, and shortly after that they announced new languages in reporting.
Help is nigh: Events to Help You Understand the Brave New World
It can all look a bit overwhelming and sometimes the devil may hide in the detail, but we are happy to help. For a start, check out these 2 events:
Concur Workshop in London
If you are based in the UK or Ireland (or otherwise happy to travel) this free Concur workshop on 16th June in London can be the day your T&E process stepped into the digital age: www.iprocon.com/WS2016
It covers the whole solution including the SAP interface and lessons from the trenches for a successful value adding project.
Concur at the SAP Insider HR2016 Conference in Vienna
For the rest of Europe: why not attend the SAPInsider HR2016 Europe conference in Vienna? Apart from a wealth of HR systems insights, Concur’s Hartmut Laser and myself will be presenting sessions on Concur and are happy to meet you between sessions to discuss. Here you can register with a EUR 200 speaker invitation discount. Get in touch now to arrange a meeting during the conference (or a call/ demo any time).
* All timings for new features are to the best of my knowledge, but this article doesn’t constitute an official roadmap, and timings or features may change without notice.
