Hi Andrew,
The two companies I've worked for both use Concur. The first company was in the 200 - 500 employee level. I can speak to the processing more for this company, rather than my current. I was the administrator responsible for nearly all aspects, except the treasury payments for cash expense reimbursements. (I did perform the extraction from Concur, which was passed along to treasury)
From a back end perspective, the journal entry, accrual extraction is fairly easy. You download detail from Concur, which already contains GL coding, among other useful detail. (This is part of the initial setup) I used Excel and built formulas to pull the information into a template, to upload into the GL. There could be some kick outs, if the user selected the incorrect cost center, etc..Concur has good reporting tools, like an audit report or, you can custom build reports.
For expense users, credit card transactions can be linked to automatically feed into Concur. The submitter would select the transactions, and "assign" them to an expense report. Select a view other drop down fields, attach support based on your travel policy, and hit submit. Cash expenses are entered from scratch, but you're not filling out a ton of fields anyway The report is then routed to an approver, most likely ones supervisor. The approver would see each transaction item, and can select it to see the detail. Also, the support is attached directly to the expense report, so one can view in PDF.
If by staffers, you mean those that will be administering, I can speak to the time efforts. AFTER the initial setup, it basically ran itself. I don't recall having to spend more than 5 hours a week in purely administrator tasks. Of course, I'd have the month end close work that required more time, but it can be fairly automated if you have good excel staffers.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
-------------------------------------------
Daniel Moro CMA
Accountant
Horsham PA
United States
-------------------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 03-19-2014 11:18 AM
From: Andrew Huggins
Subject: cloud-based expense reporting
Hello All, just wanted to see if I could get any recommendations from the group on a cloud-based expense report program that you have found success with. One aspect that we are hoping for, is a package that has an integrated travel request module. What could make our current travel request process unique is that it estimates the total cost of travel, and must be approved before anything is booked.
We have looked at Concur, and though the travel request aspect doesn't fit, the biggest challenge to the staff is getting over the belief that online expense report creation will take longer to deal with. In the end, we may have to separate the travel request and expense report processing, but it's worth looking for.
Thanks for your recommendations.
-------------------------------------------
Andrew Huggins CMA
Accountant
Tampa FL
United States
-------------------------------------------