
SAP agrees to buy expense software maker Concur for $7.3B - loganfrederick
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/09/19/concur-tech-sap-se-ma-idINL6N0RJ5G020140919
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jacques_chester
I use Concur as part of my job.

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.

~~~
joanatello
Try out Expensify - it's a post-2000 expense web and mobile app (already way
above your expectations right?)

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...](http://blog.expensify.com/2014/07/29/how-do-you-expensify-forming-
habits-with-expense-reporting/)).

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/](http://we.are.expensify.com/who-we-
need/)

~~~
martijn_himself
I do realise I am quite cynical in my comments but FWIW I do like the look of
your product- it seems to be 'leaner' and more targeted towards usability.

~~~
joanatello
ha, thank you! I wasn't offended by your comment, and in fact agree with you
that most products in this space aren't really keeping the user in mind.

Just wanted to show you that we're not ALL user unfriendly :)

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smackfu
Wonder how IBM feels about this development. From May: "IBM will cease
operating Global Expense Reporting Solutions as a standalone product,
effective March 31, 2016, and instead will refer customers to Concur."

[http://www.businesstravelnews.com/More-News/IBM-will-
cease-o...](http://www.businesstravelnews.com/More-News/IBM-will-cease-
operating-Global-Expense-Reporting-Solutions-as-a-standalone-
product,-effective-March-31,-2016/?ib=Technology&a=mgmt)

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eranation
I'm using it at work on a daily basis almost. Their expense + flight / hotel
booking system is surprisingly OK relative to enterprise software, they also
have a mobile app which is pretty great.

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...

~~~
brown_ghost
So I wonder why Concur Government edition is so awful. I mean really, really,
unusable.

~~~
thearn4
Agreed. My agency just switched over, and it is 100% awful.

~~~
peapicker
Sounds like it will fit in fine with SAP.

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msie
I was trying to investigate what Concur was about and went to their website.
They don't show any screenshots of the program (programs?). You have to give
contact details to try out their program (so their sales team can contact you
I guess). You have to give contact details to download any brochures about
their products. Ugh.

~~~
JunkDNA
This is entirely unsurprising if you've spent time around enterprise software.
I once worked in a very large, global (non-IT) company that was interested in
software made by a very well-known, large, global IT company. We wanted to see
a demo of their product. They pushed back saying "we don't need to do a demo,
we're XYZ company you know we can do it. A demo isn't worth our time. If you
want a demo, we will have to charge you $XX,000 of professional services". My
employer at the time paid it.

~~~
rokhayakebe
_we don 't need to do a demo, we're XYZ company you know we can do it_

I think this just made my day.

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deedubaya
Everyone here is complaining about Concur and how horrible it is... but it's
all relative. If you think Concur is horrible, you should have seen the
process before with in-house solutions which were both digital and analog.

It might not be perfect, but dayum is it better than where things used to be.

~~~
mathattack
I worked at a large consultancy (who creates custom expense systems amongst
other things) and their internal system was beyond awful, so I understand that
other alternatives are pretty bad.

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.

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abakker
It is likely that SAP will bring Concur in as a SuccessFactors module, which
means it will get integrated to the rest of the suite over their HANA Cloud
Platform. In the long term, this is likely to result in much better
integration to their cloud based systems than they would have had in their
legacy/on-premises systems. It is also likely that it will take significant
time for them to fully integrate it with their existing solutions, and to be
able to sell it. Ultimately, this acquisition will bolster short-term cloud
revenues, and help give its existing enterprise clients a reason to move
toward HANA.

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struct
I can see the email from HR right now: "To access Concur, go to the SAP
Portal"

Nnnnooooooo!

~~~
linker3000
...and type /SCNCCX

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

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aunty_helen
Ok so this is the third time I've drafted a comment about SAP and the
enterprise landscape to try explain this and all I can now think of is
GRRRRR!!!

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').

~~~
_pmf_
To give a brief impression, two things:

\- 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/](http://www.tcodesearch.com/))

~~~
Osmium
I really, really do not understand that website you linked to. I feel like
enterprise software is so far out of the realm of my experience that it may as
well be another planet. It makes me feel like I don't understand computers
anymore or what they're meant to _do_. I don't understand why it's necessary?

~~~
mikegioia
I wouldn't necessarily equate SAP and "enterprise software" so much. My
experience with SAP's systems is a summer internship for them and 2 years at
an employer where I entered time-tracking and expense info into one of their
programs. The entire system is basically a database engine developed a long
time ago and impossible to re-engineer now so what you're seeing is an
artifact of the past. That might be why SAP and their tcodes seem so bizarre.

Enterprise software suffers from its own problems but not all enterprise
software looks and feels like SAP.

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ccozan
I wonder what will happen with TripIt. Can anyone comment on this?

