Concur Solution Eases Expense-Report Woes On The Road

Concur Technologies

This week the ASP is introducing support for Palm devices, giving customers the ability to input expense data from the road and import that data for automated approval once back in the office.

Palm support is but one of several mobile solutions being developed at Concur, said Elena Donio, vice president of worldwide marketing at the company, based here. In the near future, support for other handheld devices, as well as voice-interaction systems will be introduced, she said.

The voice-recognition capability is expected to be developed and available within the next three to six months, she said. Concur is currently in negotiations with speech-recognition providers.

"With a limited vocabulary you can get a lot done," Donio said. The idea is for road warriors to be able to connect to Concur's travel and expense system and speak expenses such as "taxi cab, $30 dollars," for example.

Also in the works is an imaging system that links scanned images such as restaurant or transportation receipts to an expense report. The Concur Expense system acknowledges the receipt, and back-office personnel can access the receipt images from within Concur Expense.

Concur's hosted travel and expense solution, which is also available as a license, is being offered by several solution providers, including Jamcracker, KPMG and Answerthink.

"They are without a doubt the industry leader, with an installed based that is two to three times that of anyone else, and they have true experience," said Foster Schoch, a manager of workforce applications at AnswerThink who is responsible for the Concur alliance.

Concur has more than 950 clients, 600 of which are ASP customers and 100 of which are Fortune 500 organizations.

Concur's customer base ranges from midsize organizations such as Ocean Spray and Sabre to large enterprise such as SBC Communications, which has 220,000 employees using Concur's system. On average, 8,000 to 10,000 SBC employees log onto Concur Expense every day, Donio said.

Schoch said he welcomes Concur's mobile initiatives. "We are very interested in [mobile," he said. "That's certainly a direction for the industry. It's simply a necessity."

Travel and expense in itself is also a necessity, Schoch said, pointing out that it is the second-largest controllable expense in most companies. "Travel and expense has a huge impact on potential, quick [return on investment and huge dollar savings, " he said. "In times like these, these are important things."