Furthermore, amongst the already-low-priority UX issues, I can imagine UX of the expenses application being rock bottom, because which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staff to claim expenses”?
I have a background in finance, and I think everyone is missing the problem that this is trying to solve.
People are careless when they claim expenses. They claim for things they lost the receipt for and then they try and pressure some accounts clerk into forcing it through. They make careless mistakes like multiplying their milage by the wrong rate, because they don't see why they should have to look up the right one. Then their line manager doesn't get around to signing it off, so employee chases accounts team, and accounts team have to chase approvers. Senior people are usually worst.
The accounts team then hand to justify why they processed a claim despite x,y and z...to external auditors.
Setting an expectation that if you don't get it right up front, the computer won't let you through is a very powerful selling point to a CFO who has to control this rubbish
In the US, maximum allowable per diem rates vary by location and are set by the Internal Revenue Service.
Unless your per diem is completely over the top, you'll need to expense flights, hotels, team dinners, client dinners, etc.
A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.
I even remember a colleague when I worked in California boast to me about his $10000 claim recipe and the kickback.
Since it was a 5 man startup at that point I don't think it was worth the credit risk though.
Ye well ... dunno who to blame then in the CC mess.
This only adds up to a substantial benefit if you’re doing major international travel (carefully) or handling big-ticket hardware purchases on your card. Meals and travel is almost certainly a net loss.
This is a significant underestimate. Consider that the Citi Double Cash card gives unlimited 2% cash back on everything, and that a lot of other cards offer even higher rates (I've seen 5%) for individual categories.
They do care about making sure they reach the volume commitment on the bulk airfare and hotel rooms they have prepaid for in order to receive a large discount.
Prepayment that only works for the airlines and hotels if they’re not simultaneously discounting this large corporate customer’s rates AND paying fringe benefits to the end user.
And since they can’t tell you to not travel, this is generally why large company CFOs have policies in place that mandate these categories of spend are done via their travel agency, which was dominated by Concur prior to the SAP acquisition.
I haven't experienced that, though I presume you have.
First full time job I had a biz amex. Last full time job was a biz visa. Both with my name on card and neither were mine personally. I didn't pay the cc bill.
I had to do expense reports and categorize each item.
(edit: terrible stt)
To my understanding, from conversations with people on the finance side of things, the point of this game is that:
1. If you get everyone to do their own expensing; and
2. If you set up a system that's robust against mistakes made by people with no understanding of corporate finance, which is almost everyone in a given company (that's the "if you don't get it right up front, the computer won't let you through" principle you mention); and
3. If you tell everyone to use it and that it's their responsibility to be good stewards of corporate money they have the privilege of using, etc.; then...
4. ...you get to hire less people on the finance side of things.
I think it's another case of large organizations chasing legibility[0], to the detriment of everyone within. It's similar to what a lot of other office/business software does: it lets the company get rid of a class of specialist, whose salaries are clearly visible on the company books, by distributing their work more-less evenly across everyone else in the company. This, obviously, causes everyone to lose productivity, as they're being distracted with work that's outside their specialization/expertise, but that only adds up to an "unexplained" overall small productivity drop of the organization (and the frustration of most employees) and is not clearly visible in the company financials.
--
[0] - To borrow the term from Seeing Like a State.
If you lose a receipt, or aren't given one at all, for a reimbursable expense, should your employer just tell you that you're out the money for it?
Businesses that were fed up with fielding questions from employees about how to claim expenses?
In my experience it's reasonably common for companies to switch expense claim systems because their existing one was rubbish. I haven't worked for any SAP-using megacorps though tbf.
But their sales team probably plays less golf, let's put it this way
And employees are definitely going to spend the time necessary to claim expenses. They may skimp on other tasks, but expenses are money, so they are definitely not going to miss that one.
Big companies love metrics and spying on you, and the time spend on corporate apps is an easy thing to measure. So if you see that your employees spend countless hours on ERP, it should rise tons of red flags.