ExpenseIt is an app that scans and recognises your receipts, auto-populates the most important fields and creates an expense item in Concur for you. It does make your Concur based expense process even more efficient, but it’s important to manage expectations.
ExpenseIt is definitely speeding up the process for users, but it doesn’t recognise everything, particularly for non-US formats and languages other than English. (It’s language capabilities are expected to improve in the very near future, probably driven by SAP who have a very global outlook and very good grasp of the diversity apps find out there.)
So, if you sell it to users in the right way, it should add value and improve overall acceptance: Let them know that it is an accelerator, but not perfect and therefore needs a quick check of the data before submitting. The „mistakes“ may sometimes look „stupid“ from a human point of view, but machines learn differently.
Note that the tool is surprisingly good with dates and even hand written amounts (not so much currencies yet), which can lead to complacency in not checking these fields. However, it has been known in rare cases (definitely fewer than one of my own >50 receipts per month) that it picked up the wrong amount on poorly designed receipts or that it turned a pound sign into a number 5 added to the amount. Nothing that should stop you, but to be aware of.
A few interesting points on Expenseit:
– Apart from scanning paper receipts you can also send electronic receipts per email to receipts@expenseit.com. This gives you the auto-populate feature and creates expense items as it would with scanned paper receipts, making it more user friendly than forwarding them to receipts@concur.com
– Expenseit is currently not available on Concur’s EU data centre
– Not all of what the app does is tech wizzardry. The software sends some receipts for review by human operators to improve the recognition rate
– Expenseit commands an additional, reasonable subscription fee
