Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiveturkey | Hacker News Reader

wrong POV. for each individual user, the increased aggravation is tolerable. For the corporate controller, at megacorps you [apparently] need to use concur and the like. at the level of megacorp, financials must be correctly stated, auditable, and so forth.

kind of like security. why can't you just _trust_ your users to set a strong password and have a screen saver iff they are in an environment where it's helpful?

it's fun (and easy) to pick on concur but the goals of it are completely different than the goals of expensify.

View on HN

It's almost always a case of "no one got fired for buying IBM". Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco and the like are all entrenched in the business world because no one wants to be the guy to move the company over to a smaller, better, cheaper alternative just because there is a chance it could fail and their jobs would be on the line.

At least in the situations I've seen the salespeople made effective use of FUD and ego massage on less technical managers.

It wouldnt be nearly as effective though, if they werent playing the long game and if the products they sold didnt each function to increase the vendor lockin one step at a time.

There ought to be good money decoupling corporate IT systems from these systems but weirdly nobody seems to care that much about IT spend on preferred vendors.

we use Concur (1500+ employees). not my cup of tea but the accounting people love it.

Which is the classic startup story of you need to build your product for the user that is paying your bill. Even if that means subjecting the actual end users to misery…

That's IMO a short-sighted strategy. You might get somewhere but you're opening yourself up to disruption by someone who can reconcile and satisfy both end-users' and clients' requirements.

A lot of companies have made billions following it. See oracle etc. so maybe short sighted, but I think Larry is doing OK

My experience with Concur is that the product itself is not bad. Not great but not bad once you get used to it. (Fir example, there's a lot of random information asked for that varies by category which is annoying but you get used to it.) The problem is with the auditing on the Concur side, whoever's "fault" it is.

Things like any date discrepancies between the receipt and how it's entered on the report get bounced even if they're off by a day even though it's obvious and, pre-Concur, would have just been fixed in-house. Also random invocations of travel policies cause rejections rather than not just making a trivial connection. Simply not reading comments with respect to exceptions. Etc. I'm sure hundreds of hours of highly-paid people's time gets wasted.

I don't think this is Concur - I'm pretty sure this is your accounting team. Frequently the software change coincides with an outsourcing effort, so they're not being paid to be helpful, they're being paid to apply the policy as written.

Concur is painful to set-up but once it's done, it's not too bad

Reply on news.ycombinator.com