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Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

Concur is indeed a poor system.

I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them.

Or maybe that by putting up roadblocks like Concur, some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed.

The problem is that this requires educating every employee on how to use these systems. That's a waste of time and a drag on productivity. Better to hire that central person who will learn all the quirks of whatever system is used and let the other 99% of the organization do their jobs.

When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service. They don't ask each employee to learn about lighting technique and do the post processing according to a written set of standards in hopes the photos will look consistent. But with Concur that's what happens.

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> I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them.

In a big company that person who 'just accepts receipts and deals with them' will have to enter the receipt into an expenses system like Concur anyway.

Personally I find it much easier and faster to input it myself than to put everything in an envelope with enough information in the envelope to allow an admin to correctly expense/bill it (e.g. cost centers, an explanation for why the hotel was over the policy allowance, a bank transaction for that thing I lost the reciept for...).

> When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service. They don't ask each employee to learn about lighting technique and do the post processing according to a written set of standards in hopes the photos will look consistent. But with Concur that's what happens.

IMO the better comparison would be hiring an in-house photo team which has to be used any time anyone in the company wants a photo of something.

It's quicker for me to take a photo of this prototype I made than it is for me to arrange for the in-house photographer to come.

Reminds me of my very first posting in the (UK) Civil Service working as an Admin Assistant for the Highways Contracts team. Beyond filing, and delivering post to people's desks, my main work was to check through the expenses claims made by our consultants. Expenses were submitted by letter and - surprisingly - most claims made sense and would add up to the last penny correctly on first check.

Except for one firm of consultants who seemed, to me, to be chaos personified. Their expenses would go on for dozens of pages and never tallied to the amount they were claiming. In the end I resorted to hand-drawing an 'evil eye'[1] and taping it to my in-tray to try and stop the worst of their excesses reaching into my working day. Getting a promotion away from that work also helped.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_eye

I would argue that giving my receipts to an admin also requires a fair amount of input from me before they can file the expense report. I’d rather much prefer an expense tool that works.

Xero has a great tool but last I checked it was $5 per employee per month. With many not making claims every month that is too much overhead per claim.

SAP is notoriously expensive. It's not conceivable that anyone chose SAP to save a dime. Or $5.

I think that's precisely it; see my other comment about legibility here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294834. That's the conclusion I reached from listening to overworked finance people complaining about their understaffed departments handling the "audit seasons" around expenses.

And I think there's a lot more of it happening, mostly thanks to software - starting with the ubiquitous office suite, that made everyone their own secretary, manager and graphics department.

> When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service.

Do they still? My last experience with this is the company asking every employee to please kindly submit a current photo by themselves.

Obviously, the error in this kind of thinking is assuming that "having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work" is free, because "it's just a small amount of work". It is, but a) the more iterations of this happen, the more of it adds up, and b) it's disruptive to every employee, as it competes for time and focus with the specific jobs people were actually hired for, slashing productivity across the board.

> some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed.

I don't think the savings would offset the system cost. But then again, I've definitely got a threshold where just spending my money without claiming is worth it for my mental health...

I wouldn’t expect it to make things easier for employees to require them to have printed receipts for everything. That’s a roadblock in its own right.

I’ve not used Concur but I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t preferred moving on from antiquated paper processes for expenses. Faster to scan receipts on the go, easier to track, less risk of a lost receipt, bulk of expenses are incurred via a digital process anyway.

Concur tip - you can upload a 1x1 png in place of the lost receipt. (For some reason the "I don't have a receipt" option still requires you to upload a receipt.)

Which will be thrown out by finance, as they need either peoper receipts or a signed declaration of the correct amount (receipts indeed do get lost). Why? Taxes. So you 1x1 png hack will only get your expenses reimboursed later, and if accounting doesn't catch the empty png, well, you might have more serious issues.

They didn't, and it was like a 1 euro purchase.

Depends on country I guess. The rules between Germany and Luxembourg are really different. Ideally so, accounting should have caught it. Again that depends on internal rules...

We have a whole Concur team of like 5 people at least. All fte's. Employees still have to declare their own expenses. Almost 30k employees. So your suggestion of having just 1 person handling all declarations won't work unless you are suggesting 5 fte's for just Concur isn't enough.

For 30k not enough. Usually an office admin person can process that kind of stuff as part time responsibility. And you have one for every 50-100 employees. So that would be 300-600 PTE users for 30k

Yeah that will never happen. Overhead is already a few percentage points above the industry average. Self service is the industry trend as I see it in this business. Whatever vendor facilitates that will win our business.

When my company needed photos of everyone they announced a new policy and then 10 minutes later sent aggressive emails to each manager asking why they thought it was professional for their subordinates to be out of compliance. We use Concur too.

I’d rather apply Hanlon's razor here. And for your example: my employer finds it worthwhile to maintain a security person to be equipped and trained to take adequate pictures of employees in each office. It’s a linearly scaling cost that could be optimised away. But, it removes failures modes (contract photographer not delivering, employee missing an appointment, …) with total expected impact exceeding the cost of a camera and explaining to a new guy which corner of the office has the lightning set up for three point portraits.

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