SAP agrees to buy expense software maker Concur for $7.3B
in.reuters.com
in.reuters.com
It is stunningly, stupefyingly awful.
However, it is popular with the kind of hyperglobocom companies that SAP deals with.
I can submit expense reports (which take about as long as it would to scratch them into clay tablets) and I can book travel. That's about it.
I imagine that -- for the anonymous finance dept folk who delight in taking weeks to examine my reports while I am legally on the hook for the credit card bill -- it is very featuresome and powerful. As an end user I hate it with the power of a thousand exploding suns.
The mobile app for capturing receipts makes it slightly, slightly more tolerable. Slightly. But half the time it doesn't work. And I still have to go into Concur and manually line up about half of the receipts anyway.
In conclusion, somebody please put these guys out of business with a post-1998 web app. You will be both billionaires and heroes.
(I don't work for Nexonia, I work for a company that uses it)
The people who have to use this software the most (employees) would never willingly purchase it, but they are not the decision-makers for this purchase. A competitor might be able to gain traction by targeting small-but-growing companies that wish for a nicer future for their employees.
I've no doubt that there are others. I know some outsourcers of HR services, like TriNet have some modern capabilities.
But yeah, it's a cost savings system and has nothing to do with enterprise IT. Finance are the ones who demand it.
SAP is not buying this because it is a wonderful piece of software engineering, it is buying it for the CTO/ CFO contacts it can now target to sell other SAP products to.
My experience with Concur has actually been better than my previous experience with Shoeboxed because Concur is tied to my corporate AmEx card... there are actually very few expenses that I need to do much manual touchup on.
Like here are things that you don't see as a user:
* Data feeds from various providers, each with their own formats.
* Rules-engines to route for auditing.
* Auditing UIs.
* Management reporting.
* Fraud analytics.
* Feeds to accounting systems.
* Feeds to payroll and corporate card providers.
* Support for constantly changing laws around taxation in various countries.
Those are all actually complex things that need to exist to be competitive for an enterprise system. Your fancy UI is one checkbox, but you're not getting the contract against someone who does all those other things.
Seriously though, Expensify is an expense reporting solution that simplifies the process for all users invoved - employees, submitters, administrators, finance departments, HR, and the companies themselves (tax reporting, etc). Our goal is to completely change the way people do expense reports (for how we work, check out: http://blog.expensify.com/2014/07/29/how-do-you-expensify-fo...).
PS - If it's not obvious yet, I currently work at Expensify and am totally drinking the kool aid. BUT, our vision for the space is completely user driven and goes beyond a simple expense reporting solution, which makes things trés exciting around here.
On @martijn_himself's point, Expensify's business model employs a bottom-up approach. We offer a free version of Expensify for individual users to try out first, and we have found that many individual users like our product enough to introduce it into their company; in fact, that's how we've been able to fill our pipeline since we launched. User feedback actually helps us figure out what features to build next.
Take a look, try us out! use.expensify.com
PPS - we're hiring engineers if you're into this sort of thing http://we.are.expensify.com/who-we-need/
Just wanted to show you that we're not ALL user unfriendly :)
As someone who expenses occasionally (some months I have nothing, others I've gone on a work trip and I have 30 receipts) I found Expensify a little confusing at first, but with zero training I figured out how it works.
Concur, as everyone here says, sucks. The web UI is bloated and confusing, and especially the flight booking system is awful (and stupid - it's more expensive than using Kayak, and is harder to use). The mobile app does make things a bit better, but I know everyone here would go back to Expensify if they could.
I have no affiliation with Expensify, just my 2c.
http://www.businesstravelnews.com/More-News/IBM-will-cease-o...
It's quite a complex topic, lot's of corporate policies to enforce, and basically they had to develop all the tech facade that Kayak, Expedia etc have (flight and hotel booking) as well as a lot of financial logic for expenses.
There is a lot of money in enterprise software... I wish more YC startups would tackle that area...
Enterprise Software requires more much investment in Sales/Marketing so these companies often they invest a lot less in engineering.
YC companies historically tend to be more engineering-focused. Many are now going up market so you start to see more YC job posts for marketing and sales positions now so this is probably changing.
Unfortunately in enterprise-land, it's a tough sell for startups. No one in middle management wants to be that person who doesn't stick to the Status Quo when it comes to software purchasing or choosing which technologies to implement. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is the old saying I believe.
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/outsourcing/3275270/astr...
I haven't really played with the TripIt integration or other bells AMD whistles.
- UI - I could figure it out, but I bet many people will find it super confusing - Tickets were bought via mentioned TripIt, but they required me to find some kind of receipt to approve this expense, even so tickets were booked through them - Their support is very slow and very un-precise. And absence of support precision in such a horrible system is bad.
But I guess they are just like SAP. They don't have to demo it or make it better. They already got name and can just push garbage down throat of other large enterprises.
I think this just made my day.
It might not be perfect, but dayum is it better than where things used to be.
That said, my (small) company uses Excel, and the experience is much better than Concur.
Perhaps it's a case of a large customer base on a high margin business being more important than a good product.
Nnnnooooooo!
I really believe corporates only put up with such a shitty UI because 'we spent soooo much money on it, we'd better use it'.
/Hates every minute of working with our SAP system
To avoid a the down votes, I should probably mention that you have to experience the enterprise landscape firsthand to be able to comprehend why it is. (That's it, 'why it is').
- parts of the server side SAP components communicate via telnet
- the user interface of SAP requires users to navigate between different dialogs/forms by manually entering a so-called transaction code (p.e. http://www.tcodesearch.com/)
Enterprise software suffers from its own problems but not all enterprise software looks and feels like SAP.
After logging in the user should see a User menu (tree form) filled with entries depending on his given role. If there are no entries then it's the administrator's/consutlant's/integrator's fault and not SAP's fault. Additionally you can add transaction to your Favorites by simply rightclicking the "Favorites" menu entry and clicking on Insert Transaction. You can even sort and rename your favorites.