In my experience, the far bigger complaints with corporate expense management software is the audit process which kicks back expenses often for random and trivial reasons rather than the software itself--which may not be magical but generally isn't the main source of pain.
Sometimes they work together! I submitted an email receipt and it kept getting rejected because Concur only shows the first page of a multi-page PDF unless you go through some very non-obvious navigation to see the whole thing.
I was a bit vexed when my expense report with something I bought at a retail store, with the receipt, was rejected because I did not provide an invoice with my name printed on it. But that wasn't even the software!
This is true for me and I have been recently submitting many expenses each week - it always worked. Hell I even liked the itemized expense entry feature!
As the author mentions. This was a failure on and down the chain, from QA to PMs.
When I see software like this, it reeks to me of contractor work. We hire them to handle something that we don’t have time for our core team, and or something not very important.
The result is the devs do a minimal job to get paid. QA doesn’t care and the PMs either didn’t see it, or have bigger fish to fry.
That’s funny. I used to work for a high-end consulting company, and we always marveled at the level of dysfunction in our clients’ IT departments. They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done. I guess it just depends on the kind of contractor you hire.
I don't think there's a logical inconsistency here. Imagine that the quality of work we can expect from a contractor with no particular investment in your long-term success is a 7. If your internal team can produce a 10 given the time, you'd look at that and think it's not very good. On the other hand, if your internal team can only manage a 4, hey, go with the contractor.
Typical consultant mindset. They cant fathom how big IT got into the situation they are in due to legacy software, mergers, and periods of no investment. They only do greenfield projects and have complete disregard for IT’s processes.
What’s funny is the big consultancies are usually to blame for stupid IT or they make bean counter decisions to not invest in IT. Thus the reason we need chop shops to come in and and help. Oh, and god forbid we add an FTE with domain experience who can help us.
I didn’t sense all of that from the comment, but you’re definitely anti-consultant.
Sometimes consultants are brought in specifically to bypass whatever internal processes are in place. Those internal processes are sometimes the very reason not enough is getting done and external resources are brought in.
I would say that GP comment definitely has a “normal teams are useless until consultants come in” view, which the parent comment also seemed to pick up on. Specifically, this part bugged me:
> They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done.
This makes it seem like the developers just didn’t want to do the work or it was harder than their skill level, which, realistically, isn’t the case.
FWIW I agree that consultants have their place, especially as a way to work outside of the typical system, but I’m not about to ignore that GP practically made it sound like consultants are better than regular developers.
As someone who works in big consulting I understand the frustration but have to disagree. A lot of the time we have great people doing great work but we can only take it so far. Clients have to both be willing (want to) and able (have people with the appropriate skills required) to change. If we aren't guiding implementation and leave it to the client often times it will just fall in a heap, out be forgotten about
Perhaps a matter of levels. High end consultants usually have some reputation to maintain. Places like IBM and Accenture are just good at navigating large org purchasing, so as the only bidders in many cases, can put out shit.
That’s funny. I’ve recently been involved with several projects steered by high-end consulting firms. They were all complete shit shows, most of all the SAP projects.
The problem IMO is, that on the corporate side, you often don’t have any IT knowledge at all. So they hire consultants to ask them what to do and don’t have any way of confirming if what they are being told is sane advice.
I’m also really shocked by what the likes of McKinsey of Accenture get away with regarding the quality of people they send.
Edit: I guess I misunderstood “high-end” and thought of “large” consulting firms, because those are the ones that pretty much always suck. I’ve had wonderful experiences with small consultancies.
If you work in consulting and you think you deliver good stuff, you are either incredibly lucky (lottery winner level), or you are so incompetent that you dont know you deliver utter crap.
What is your definition of getting the job done? 50% of projects run by consultants fail.
Seriously this level of smug shows how clueless you are.
I worked in few consulting firms and know the internal stats.
For ERP impelmentations, failure rate is even more than 50%. Gartner says it is 55% to 75%.
For digital transformations I think the stats are closer to 50%, but it more depends on the company and their project scope.
Maybe the poster above makes some small landing pages for micro companies.
For greenfield projects made by agencies "it depends" but usually quality is utter crap. The project "works" but no change is possible easily, so at the end of the day the projects are failures.
When you say "contractor work", do you mean agencies, or the work of individual contractors?
Individual contractors in my experience tend to be very good (above average) and do care about building quality software - their reputations depend on it.
Agencies on the other hand are a nightmare. I have nothing against junior devs but in my experience agencies love to put junior devs on projects they're unqualified for and then give them bare minimum support and guidance. And obviously they'll happily cut corners because technical debt is their problem so most stuff is hacked together so it just about works, but is utterly unmaintainable.
Having once been a junior dev at an agency, I can confirm most of what you're saying. I would add that the strongest advocates for cutting corners tend to be leadership and management, who have been through this before and know that as soon as they can get the client to agree that release 1 is done, the rest is the support team's problem.
I find the quality of individual contractors can vary massively. Some are brilliant while others are borderline useless with behavioural problems to boot, yet somehow aren't being fired.
One argument I'll always make in defence of agencies/contractors is that a lot of problems stem from the fact that the client is often not engaged and believes that because they hired you, there's no effort required on their end.
This is common for software where the people who take the decision which software to buy are far removed from the people who are going to use it.
No product manager cared about this, because this feature needs to work only well enough for a sales pitch, if even that.
As long as the product supports the needs of the buyer (administration and reporting, rules engine for product selection, etc.), the needs of the end-user can be neglected. HRIS software (PeopleSoft, SuccessFactors, Workday, etc.) is the same way. The deals keep close and the checks keep coming in.
I don't think it's fair to say with a lot of this software that no one cares, though, just that the business as a whole adds up to a poor frontline experience.
It would surprise me exactly 0% to learn that there was a whole "improve the Concur UX for frontline users" team who repeatedly get their feature asks deprioritized in favor of something needed to close a deal.
And, also consider that when it comes to these sorts of big enterprise products, many are drowning under 20+ years of trying to support every bizarre customized customer corner case, third-party integration, and often with no ability to deprecate an old feature. Perhaps adding sort capability breaks some arcane customer scripting functionality added ten years ago which is poorly understood, but cannot be removed due to a clause in the MSA.
Usually I would agree, but SAP and other ERP software are handled differently from most other software procurement.
Procurement is one of the core functions of the SAP ecosystem, so those most closely involved in buying it here are usually the ones who will be using it.
The Concur UI is a bucket of ass, classic enterprise software. Barely tolerable when it is working, and it is broken or super slow maybe 1 in 4 times I try to use it.
On the trip side, the car rental selector is something special. You can't check multiple vendors at once, so if cars are in demand, expect to spend a while discovering you can't get one.
These kind of bad UX problem can be easier to rationalize once we understand the money flow. Would you stop using it because of such UX? Would your stopping cause the company to stop procuring SAP? Was the search the selling point in the first place when the sales representative pitch the software to finance department? Probably no, no and no. So are all other bad UXes.
And we can probably wager that a better UX doesn't yield the developer a better pay cheque.
The ironic thing is that if the user stops using this software the company benefits because they don't have to pay out the expense claim that the user didn't enter. This seems like a win for the company and the company would conclude that using SAP has reduced their expenses.
The key thing about enterprise software is that it's never sold to end-users, it's sold to senior managers and executives. The contact that this group will have with the software is to approve transactions (e.g., Reqs, POs, Expense Claims, etc) and maybe view some reports. You can bet that these interactions are very streamlined.
It also probably describes long lead times and lots of overhead (expensive deployments etc).
I guess the question that is often missing when these systems are specified and bought is “if we find a trivial but annoying UX papercut issue in the software which is 5 minutes of actual development time, how quickly and how cheaply would we have that fixed once we report the issue?”
Having systems people like is important. I think that often seems to get lost.
I think you could also work from likely evolution of the system. Probably this was just a string and somebody at some point thought, hey, let's add suggestions and did the quickest way they could think of to do that without fundamentally reworking.
The is the hallmark of bureaucracy. Seperate the functions, and then let each team externalise the costs without any checks and balances.
Finance purchase Concur because it solves their problems and integrates with their existing tools. They don't care that people hate it, or that it wastes the company's resourcing when people are fighting a broken UI instead of doing their day job.
Normally engineers are shielded from this pattern in their day jobs. But I have worked at companies that have gone the other direction. In one I met with a risk averse gatekeeping team and told them that for a newly acquired product we were not going to be able to meet the (arbitrary) SLO for the glut of tickets they assigned us, and asked for help. Their suggestion was to pull the app from market.
This is a clear indication that the user is not the customer. The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. This happened to the phone handsets when iphone arrived.
So, future investors - look at the startups that address the user problems, not the client problems, even though the latter are paying.
The two are fundamentally different. Unless you can devise a way to do BYO expense platform, you're comparing B2B to B2C product development, marketing and sales.
Do you think the PMs at Concur just woke up one day and decided to be user hostile because they're asshats? Of course not. They did what the Sales team, and Gartner, told them they needed to give to CFOs so that they would buy it. And then CFOs bought it.
Until someone can quantify the benefit of "better UX" to CFOs, or provide that and all the CFO facing features they want, crappy expense platforms will continue to be the order of the day.
It will be impossible to do any real comparison because the bad stuff is relatively entrenched at most large places.
Small quality issues for users would reduce errors, and get expense data reconciled faster. But… by how much? 10%? 20%? No one will care enough to fund a large system replacement for a 10% reduction in expense report filing.
> The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out.
I find it a little hard to see to be honest. Team members might push to use Slack over some other chat solution because they spend all day using that -- I've seen that happen and work. How often do you do expense reports that you're really going to nag the company to buy your favorite solution?
I hate submitting expenses probably as much as the typical engineer, but Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems.
I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature.
I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state, happily inquiring as to whether I intend to drive 225 miles to my entered street name before a matching entry that’s 4 miles away.
Of course, Google Maps seems to be equally random when it starts guessing your destination.
I reluctantly started using a corporate card for most things because I sort of had to. I don't like not getting the personal benefits but it actually does make (most) things easier with Concur. Only real issue is it's harder to split personal and company charges.
Yes. But it means that all the expenses are accounted for and added to the expense report even if I need to add receipts for some of them and may have to add some additional information, e.g. category. As I say, not my choice but it probably captures some random fees etc. that I otherwise tend to forget about.
Depends. Most companies would have you specify the project/cost centre for every purchase, but amounts/locations/etc are automatically provided by the card issuer.
I'd hazard a guess that it's because it's sold to finance people that value that sort of functionality (reconciliation of bank statement events with expense claims). Not much thought is given to the end users that have to put up with these tools.
The issue is a typical moral hazard, where the people who buy the software aren't the ones who have to bear the pain of using it.
The requirements from the finance team were probably all around “expense coding is mandatory” and “pick things from a list to avoid typos”; i.e. things that make their lives easier.
When it came to user experience, it got a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or no consideration at all. After all, most finance people rarely if ever travel.
SAP has little incentive to put effort (money) into fixing it, because (1) they’ve got an ecosystem of third parties that do that and also probably serve as resellers or at least evangelists, and (2) complaints are going to help desk, not finance, so SAP’s paying customers aren't advocating for a fix.
Executives are just handing their EA’s a wad of receipts; they don't feel the pain either.
Used to use concur in a past life, now expensify. There's not even words for how much better expensify is.
It wasn't _that_ bad for a lot of entry types, but for me what made it a constant problem were hotels. It wanted a daily rate and number of days. Yet our rates were different day by day, and it made you do a separate tax entry. So you're having to BS a close enough "daily rate" and adjust the tax field of a specific day to adjust for any single penny rounding errors. Then there were resort fees or other things, which it would also make you call out but I think it even had a fixed number of "extra fees" input boxes.
For a set of a few non travel expenses it was only a bit worse than any system ought to be. For travel it was practically unusable and for reasons that actually butchered your report
I do remember that being a thing, but I think with the way it auto populated from our booking system meant I couldn't use it. It's been a bit, but I'm pretty sure I had to go through that realization each time too
I use Concur and just enter the total and enter X nights in $CITY for a justification. I don't need to enter nightly total much less any sort of breakdowns. As I said in another comment, a LOT of Concur (and expense software generally) pain relates to the hoops a company makes you go through as opposed to the software itself.
When we first implemented Concur, there was a lot of kvetching. A bunch of requirements got dialed down and while there are still a few silly things here and there, they're easy to work around once you know about them and it's mostly just the very random audit thing at this point.
i had the opposite experience where i moved jobs from and the transition from concur to expensify was brutal. duplicate or blackholed entries and submissions. obfuscated mandatory policies. obtuse allocation methods, and per diem breakdowns felt as though they were being actively hostile to the user.
expensify felt like a jr. high coding project and i hated it to the point of putting a time tracking line item in for expense reports.
Disagree. I've used Expensify at a couple smaller companies and a couple versions of Concur at megacorp. The earlier versions of Concur (ca. 2015 – unsure how far behind the current version we were at the time) required you to fire up a VM and use an ancient version of IE to use it. The more modern version was a bit better in that regard.
Expensify though, that was like this interview I had where the CEO walked in at the end, introduced himself, and then explained he wanted me to make their web site "Web 2.0!!!" as they pivoted away from their core business. They hit all of the buzzwords. Ugh. Unfinished and buggy to the point where I fired off an angry email to Expensify for being so shit.
We used Excel based expense reporting for years, it takes me much less time to assemble my reports on concur, I rather like it, its the least of all evils.
Could it be that by using Excel you just move complexity of reporting to someone who have to extract these data from Excel and import it into some system or analyze it?
It's not so much complexity as it is removing manual process steps and reducing all the risks and overhead associated with taking data on one format and loading it in to another - at scale
Without good validation (possibly including locked sheets), people will make all fashions of inconsistent entries that “look right enough” but will stymie automated ingestion.
We had some hellish “use Excel as an interface to ‘real SAP’ process” for budgeting/headcount planning and it was almost utility-free for us as users. Even doing copy/paste would break parts of it, but invisibly to the user in real-time but would fail on import days/weeks later.
You never did this, so you dont know that even the "simplest" thing like writing an address can be done in 50 differenr ways, and then someone has to clean up the data before importing.
Of course you can partially prepare for it by making a file where users have to pick things like town name from a scroll down list (hope your list has every town), but they still can get "creative" and mess it up.
Depends on the company. If they don’t really care it’s more evidence/proof of expense than anything.
My last employer used some stupid Oracle system to audit the hell out of everything. One time I was flagged for taking a suboptimal route that increased toll expense by $3. Hilarious. I spent like 1.5 hours @ $90 on justification of $3.
Yeah, our automated system (Concur) does end up insisting on justifications for why you picked the 12 hour direct flight which is $100 more expensive than the three options with 2 stopovers and a total travel time in the 18-20 hour range (or sometimes even overnight stays in airports).
Feels like a lot of the goal in these systems is to try enforce rules that no person expense manager could try insist on with a straight face. If even 10% of the company gets scared off by the justification demand and books the inconvenient option, that's $20k/yr saved.
Which is still probably peanuts compared to what Concur costs, but that cost is somebody else's problem to the finance person who gets to claim savings on annual flight costs.
My company uses a horrible SAP interface. I then had the complexity of making an Excel sheet that actually works, and making it properly interface with SAP so I only have to use the excel sheet.
As a SAP developer there are so many ways to read Excel sheets but they all suck in one way or another - SAP itself does that but it depends on which SAP module you are programming in (MM/FICO/EWM) so each module has a mediocre implementation to read in XLS.
Somebody got fed up and did a general purpose XLS import library, but some sites forbid you using it.
After it was sent off, Accounting might just decide to not pay it because no receipt for the coin-op laundry machine I used, when I pointed out it was coin-op laundry, they just shrugged, and then approved it. Meanwhile, while they dicker I'm sitting on multiple thousands of dollars of expenses.
Other issues were making sure I had the correct form, multiple approvals, etc. Now before this process, we used all the same forms but printed out.
Using Concur -
A) the the app to scan my receipts
B) attach receipts to company card expenses
C) deal with some drop downs for some stuff concur has flagged out of process
D) send to manager
Now I lost my per-diem in this, but they cover everything now with the exception of tips to the housekeeper (I've just not tried it yet).
The downside is any payments from the company now take multiple weeks, lol.
Using the excel process, would take me about 1-1.5 hours per week of travel, under Concur its about a about .5-.75 hours per week of travel.
Automating policy always ends up manifesting all of the crufty, imprecisely implemented “people” and policy issues of an organization, just using computer UIs. This often restricts these kinds of systems from UI / user delight greatness.
I had designed a simple excel file and upload template with my piss poor accounting system years ago but, of course, head office wanted to use concur so now it's a bit of a mess and our compliance is far worse than it was...
I've used Concur and Certify and they are oodles better than the crappy one that my company now uses that probably hasn't changed since the early 2000's and doesn't have any sort of mobile support for uploading receipts.
The software we used before Concur was definitely better, or maybe it was the original version of the software before SAP bought them, I'm not sure. Prior to the switch, expense reports would take 5-10 minutes. After the switch, more than an hour easily. They made a lot of changes to Concur to try to help speed up the process, and fill gaps where the old software worked great. However, the final product still ended up far less efficient, and far more confusing.
I have used Concur and don't have any strong feelings about it. It is not wonderful but it does the job. I think it is a little overwrought to call it a "horror show" that the list isn't really sorted. Presumably they see typing in the place name as the primary use case and this was an afterthought. I kind of expected serious bugs from the title.
No, neither what it is doing or what it ought to be doing is a topological sort. What it is actually doing seems like “return all matching the stem without any sort [or sorted by ID or some other non-relevant value].”
The various things the user suggest are all sorts by fairly simple functions, not the kind of dependency ordering at issue with a topological sort. Choosing the best one to use as a default might be hard, but they aren’t the kind of complex things you can’t implement as a simple order-by once you are set up for it.
SAP Concur is a complete nightmare for managing expenses. It's so bad that it will ruin your entire weekend, leaving you feeling frustrated and drained. The interface is a convoluted mess that is practically impossible to navigate, and entering expenses takes forever.
The expense categorization system is an abomination that will drive you insane with its constant mistakes and errors. The approval process is a black hole that sucks up your expenses and never spits them back out. I feel SAP Concur is the worst software ever created for expense management, and using it makes me wish I never had to do expenses again.
Expensify is so much better. The OCR isn't great though
Concur's backend is typical of a slow moving industry that works with old awkward systems like airlines. It's a shitshow of business logic and 20 year old legacy code that would be a long expensive nightmare to rewrite for little actual profit so no manager would ever approve of such an endeavor. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mess of queries involved with this search such that trying to do a real sort of the results would require a significant degree of rewriting and touching scary code with huge amounts of bureaucratic review in order to be DOD compliant, so it gets labeled as "good enough" even if the current state drives some developers crazy.
They need to call a sort function. It can happen in the client, because the data set is small. It should have happened when the app was first written, at which time they weren’t maintaining legacy code - they were writing a UI from scratch and could make changes easily. Sort functions are built in to every programming language I’ve ever used.
I agree with the author. There’s no reason for it to be like this but incompetence - either at an individual level, system level or both.
In 30 years of programming I've worked in plenty of systems where this sort of thing is nontrivial too. But its always the result of incompetent abstractions getting in the programmer's way.
Downvotes notwithstanding, I stand by my claim that this is always the result of incompetence. Either at the small level (laziness) or at a larger scale (incompetent system design).
I would even go as far as saying the opposite - engineers too "competent" for their own good.
I've walked in to so many code based where very talented individuals have made incredibly complex systems, using all their technical know how of best practices & patterns, abstraction layers and facades ... and ignored the fact that all they needed was a three field form with a submit button.
It's not just worth knowing if you can, it's if you should.
The novice creates simple work because she isn't capable. The apprentice makes unnecessarily complex designs to impress. The master makes things simple because extra work would be unnecessary. Mastery isn't measured by much complexity has been added. Its measured by how much complexity has been taken away.
It’s also very possible this list is configured by the IT department that purchased Concur. If this list is always set by purchaser configuration, not sorting kind of makes.
You are probably right. I've just tried same query ("los a") in Concur app and it was sorted alphabetically for me. Still included Spain and Chile locations though.
The IT department does not make purchases such as Concur as it is way out of their core competency.
It is the finance department under the auspices of the CFO / the managing director that do. Those people are non-technical and don't understand the technology. Therefore, anything that is more modern than an abacus is pitched (and ususally later sold as well) to them as the best thing they will have ever seen.
This is the least of SAP's crimes against software. Pretty much everything SAP builds is janky and awful like this. If you're lucky, "minor" UX problems like these are the only thing you have to deal with, but in the vast majority of cases, that's not going to be the case.
Where I work, I also have to use a SAP system for expense reports. I can't even tell you what it's called, but the interface is basically just directly from SAP GUI(except embedded, very poorly, into a website) and every single interaction you perform results in a sync query to the backend, freezing the UI until you get a response.
The worst part is that no one really cares. SAP doesn't care. The users/companies that are stuck with SAP don't really care, or at least if they do, well, no one is going to spend valuable dev time on building their own internal expense registration platform(or whatever) just to fix something that sucks to use, but otherwise "works".
I also have to register my hours, being a consultant, and this also happens via some SAP system. One thing my current project manager told me recently is that the description field that we have to use to describe what work we did is just invisibly cut to 40 characters on the backend. I can freely type a whole essay describing what I did, but the pm reviewing will just see 40 characters.
Assuming that any sort of thought goes into most of SAP's software is like trying to reason about an insane person's behavior. It's completely pointless since there is no reason involved.
Even Google Calendar does this. If I'm adding an event an hour from now, why does the Location auto-complete list show locations that are impossible to reach in time at the top of the list? Is it not more likely that I would be booking an event near to my either my current location or my home?
A few years ago, we were building somethings to integrate with multiple expense and invoice management systems. Concur's odata based APIs were by far one of the worst integration experiences I had. (Even worse than integrating with dot net SOAP APIs from AXIS and Java)
You could see that some of the older APIs were well documented and thought out and the new versions were considerably worse. What we realized was that the earlier versions were built prior to SAP acquiring Concur.
I was forced to use an SAP product at an old job about 15 years ago.
Unfortunately, I find it completely unsurprising that any SAP.* product is a dis-organized mess of a kludge, with no rationality evident anywhere.
Oh, and the CIO who foisted that pile of cr*p upon my organisation? She moved on shortly after SAP was implemented -- undoubtedly to foist SAP on some other poor unsuspecting org. I sure hope her SAP stock has tanked.
I interviewed with them prior to the SAP acquisition back in 2017.
"We're looking for someone with experience with ASP and database performance improvements."
"You mean, ASP.net - not old school VB6 derived, interpreted - 'pretty cool for 1997' Active Server Pages - ASP?"
"Hey hey! You're the guy we want!"
Of course I would have taken the job if I'd known they'd be acquired.
edit: Huh, they were acquired in 2014? Ah well - it's like someone's MVP that made it out to production, then they made it big and that MVP kept being glommed onto.
Sometimes when I feel like the worse product manager in the world, I just click that Concur link in my work computer browser’s bookmark bar to remind myself that, even if I suck, some bloke at SAP is doing their job even more terribly than me..
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadWhen I see software like this, it reeks to me of contractor work. We hire them to handle something that we don’t have time for our core team, and or something not very important.
The result is the devs do a minimal job to get paid. QA doesn’t care and the PMs either didn’t see it, or have bigger fish to fry.
What’s funny is the big consultancies are usually to blame for stupid IT or they make bean counter decisions to not invest in IT. Thus the reason we need chop shops to come in and and help. Oh, and god forbid we add an FTE with domain experience who can help us.
Sometimes consultants are brought in specifically to bypass whatever internal processes are in place. Those internal processes are sometimes the very reason not enough is getting done and external resources are brought in.
> They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done.
This makes it seem like the developers just didn’t want to do the work or it was harder than their skill level, which, realistically, isn’t the case.
FWIW I agree that consultants have their place, especially as a way to work outside of the typical system, but I’m not about to ignore that GP practically made it sound like consultants are better than regular developers.
The problem IMO is, that on the corporate side, you often don’t have any IT knowledge at all. So they hire consultants to ask them what to do and don’t have any way of confirming if what they are being told is sane advice.
I’m also really shocked by what the likes of McKinsey of Accenture get away with regarding the quality of people they send.
Edit: I guess I misunderstood “high-end” and thought of “large” consulting firms, because those are the ones that pretty much always suck. I’ve had wonderful experiences with small consultancies.
What is your definition of getting the job done? 50% of projects run by consultants fail.
Seriously this level of smug shows how clueless you are.
For ERP impelmentations, failure rate is even more than 50%. Gartner says it is 55% to 75%.
For digital transformations I think the stats are closer to 50%, but it more depends on the company and their project scope. Maybe the poster above makes some small landing pages for micro companies.
For greenfield projects made by agencies "it depends" but usually quality is utter crap. The project "works" but no change is possible easily, so at the end of the day the projects are failures.
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/mx/Documents/...
https://www.pemeco.com/two-big-reasons-erp-implementation-fa...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gartner-75-all-erp-projects-f...
https://venturebeat.com/business/report-orgs-wasted-4-12m-on...?
Individual contractors in my experience tend to be very good (above average) and do care about building quality software - their reputations depend on it.
Agencies on the other hand are a nightmare. I have nothing against junior devs but in my experience agencies love to put junior devs on projects they're unqualified for and then give them bare minimum support and guidance. And obviously they'll happily cut corners because technical debt is their problem so most stuff is hacked together so it just about works, but is utterly unmaintainable.
I find the quality of individual contractors can vary massively. Some are brilliant while others are borderline useless with behavioural problems to boot, yet somehow aren't being fired.
One argument I'll always make in defence of agencies/contractors is that a lot of problems stem from the fact that the client is often not engaged and believes that because they hired you, there's no effort required on their end.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the definition of enterprise software.
As long as the product supports the needs of the buyer (administration and reporting, rules engine for product selection, etc.), the needs of the end-user can be neglected. HRIS software (PeopleSoft, SuccessFactors, Workday, etc.) is the same way. The deals keep close and the checks keep coming in.
I don't think it's fair to say with a lot of this software that no one cares, though, just that the business as a whole adds up to a poor frontline experience.
It would surprise me exactly 0% to learn that there was a whole "improve the Concur UX for frontline users" team who repeatedly get their feature asks deprioritized in favor of something needed to close a deal.
And, also consider that when it comes to these sorts of big enterprise products, many are drowning under 20+ years of trying to support every bizarre customized customer corner case, third-party integration, and often with no ability to deprecate an old feature. Perhaps adding sort capability breaks some arcane customer scripting functionality added ten years ago which is poorly understood, but cannot be removed due to a clause in the MSA.
Procurement is one of the core functions of the SAP ecosystem, so those most closely involved in buying it here are usually the ones who will be using it.
On the trip side, the car rental selector is something special. You can't check multiple vendors at once, so if cars are in demand, expect to spend a while discovering you can't get one.
And we can probably wager that a better UX doesn't yield the developer a better pay cheque.
The key thing about enterprise software is that it's never sold to end-users, it's sold to senior managers and executives. The contact that this group will have with the software is to approve transactions (e.g., Reqs, POs, Expense Claims, etc) and maybe view some reports. You can bet that these interactions are very streamlined.
I guess the question that is often missing when these systems are specified and bought is “if we find a trivial but annoying UX papercut issue in the software which is 5 minutes of actual development time, how quickly and how cheaply would we have that fixed once we report the issue?”
Having systems people like is important. I think that often seems to get lost.
Finance purchase Concur because it solves their problems and integrates with their existing tools. They don't care that people hate it, or that it wastes the company's resourcing when people are fighting a broken UI instead of doing their day job.
Normally engineers are shielded from this pattern in their day jobs. But I have worked at companies that have gone the other direction. In one I met with a risk averse gatekeeping team and told them that for a newly acquired product we were not going to be able to meet the (arbitrary) SLO for the glut of tickets they assigned us, and asked for help. Their suggestion was to pull the app from market.
So, future investors - look at the startups that address the user problems, not the client problems, even though the latter are paying.
Do you think the PMs at Concur just woke up one day and decided to be user hostile because they're asshats? Of course not. They did what the Sales team, and Gartner, told them they needed to give to CFOs so that they would buy it. And then CFOs bought it.
Until someone can quantify the benefit of "better UX" to CFOs, or provide that and all the CFO facing features they want, crappy expense platforms will continue to be the order of the day.
Small quality issues for users would reduce errors, and get expense data reconciled faster. But… by how much? 10%? 20%? No one will care enough to fund a large system replacement for a 10% reduction in expense report filing.
I find it a little hard to see to be honest. Team members might push to use Slack over some other chat solution because they spend all day using that -- I've seen that happen and work. How often do you do expense reports that you're really going to nag the company to buy your favorite solution?
I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature.
I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state, happily inquiring as to whether I intend to drive 225 miles to my entered street name before a matching entry that’s 4 miles away.
I reluctantly started using a corporate card for most things because I sort of had to. I don't like not getting the personal benefits but it actually does make (most) things easier with Concur. Only real issue is it's harder to split personal and company charges.
This surprised me too. Every expense system is ass but at least that saves a lot of data entry.
The issue is a typical moral hazard, where the people who buy the software aren't the ones who have to bear the pain of using it.
The requirements from the finance team were probably all around “expense coding is mandatory” and “pick things from a list to avoid typos”; i.e. things that make their lives easier.
When it came to user experience, it got a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or no consideration at all. After all, most finance people rarely if ever travel.
SAP has little incentive to put effort (money) into fixing it, because (1) they’ve got an ecosystem of third parties that do that and also probably serve as resellers or at least evangelists, and (2) complaints are going to help desk, not finance, so SAP’s paying customers aren't advocating for a fix.
Executives are just handing their EA’s a wad of receipts; they don't feel the pain either.
It wasn't _that_ bad for a lot of entry types, but for me what made it a constant problem were hotels. It wanted a daily rate and number of days. Yet our rates were different day by day, and it made you do a separate tax entry. So you're having to BS a close enough "daily rate" and adjust the tax field of a specific day to adjust for any single penny rounding errors. Then there were resort fees or other things, which it would also make you call out but I think it even had a fixed number of "extra fees" input boxes.
For a set of a few non travel expenses it was only a bit worse than any system ought to be. For travel it was practically unusable and for reasons that actually butchered your report
That’s how long I’ve been filing expense reports with concur for hotels.
I use Concur and just enter the total and enter X nights in $CITY for a justification. I don't need to enter nightly total much less any sort of breakdowns. As I said in another comment, a LOT of Concur (and expense software generally) pain relates to the hoops a company makes you go through as opposed to the software itself.
When we first implemented Concur, there was a lot of kvetching. A bunch of requirements got dialed down and while there are still a few silly things here and there, they're easy to work around once you know about them and it's mostly just the very random audit thing at this point.
expensify felt like a jr. high coding project and i hated it to the point of putting a time tracking line item in for expense reports.
Expensify though, that was like this interview I had where the CEO walked in at the end, introduced himself, and then explained he wanted me to make their web site "Web 2.0!!!" as they pivoted away from their core business. They hit all of the buzzwords. Ugh. Unfinished and buggy to the point where I fired off an angry email to Expensify for being so shit.
We had some hellish “use Excel as an interface to ‘real SAP’ process” for budgeting/headcount planning and it was almost utility-free for us as users. Even doing copy/paste would break parts of it, but invisibly to the user in real-time but would fail on import days/weeks later.
Of course you can partially prepare for it by making a file where users have to pick things like town name from a scroll down list (hope your list has every town), but they still can get "creative" and mess it up.
My last employer used some stupid Oracle system to audit the hell out of everything. One time I was flagged for taking a suboptimal route that increased toll expense by $3. Hilarious. I spent like 1.5 hours @ $90 on justification of $3.
Feels like a lot of the goal in these systems is to try enforce rules that no person expense manager could try insist on with a straight face. If even 10% of the company gets scared off by the justification demand and books the inconvenient option, that's $20k/yr saved.
Which is still probably peanuts compared to what Concur costs, but that cost is somebody else's problem to the finance person who gets to claim savings on annual flight costs.
Somebody got fed up and did a general purpose XLS import library, but some sites forbid you using it.
A) Scan everything
B) figure out what portion of it needed expensed
C) Fill out expense form
D) send to my manager for approval
After it was sent off, Accounting might just decide to not pay it because no receipt for the coin-op laundry machine I used, when I pointed out it was coin-op laundry, they just shrugged, and then approved it. Meanwhile, while they dicker I'm sitting on multiple thousands of dollars of expenses.
Other issues were making sure I had the correct form, multiple approvals, etc. Now before this process, we used all the same forms but printed out.
Using Concur -
A) the the app to scan my receipts
B) attach receipts to company card expenses
C) deal with some drop downs for some stuff concur has flagged out of process
D) send to manager
Now I lost my per-diem in this, but they cover everything now with the exception of tips to the housekeeper (I've just not tried it yet).
The downside is any payments from the company now take multiple weeks, lol.
Using the excel process, would take me about 1-1.5 hours per week of travel, under Concur its about a about .5-.75 hours per week of travel.
Circula has been good to me. I've submitted maybe 50 expenses with it, it's very easy to use.
Not associated, other than being a (suprised) happy customer.
The software we used before Concur was definitely better, or maybe it was the original version of the software before SAP bought them, I'm not sure. Prior to the switch, expense reports would take 5-10 minutes. After the switch, more than an hour easily. They made a lot of changes to Concur to try to help speed up the process, and fill gaps where the old software worked great. However, the final product still ended up far less efficient, and far more confusing.
I wouldn't challenge that concur sucks, the fact that you receipts are OCRed from the app but not from the website drove me nuts
No, neither what it is doing or what it ought to be doing is a topological sort. What it is actually doing seems like “return all matching the stem without any sort [or sorted by ID or some other non-relevant value].”
The various things the user suggest are all sorts by fairly simple functions, not the kind of dependency ordering at issue with a topological sort. Choosing the best one to use as a default might be hard, but they aren’t the kind of complex things you can’t implement as a simple order-by once you are set up for it.
The expense categorization system is an abomination that will drive you insane with its constant mistakes and errors. The approval process is a black hole that sucks up your expenses and never spits them back out. I feel SAP Concur is the worst software ever created for expense management, and using it makes me wish I never had to do expenses again.
Expensify is so much better. The OCR isn't great though
I agree with the author. There’s no reason for it to be like this but incompetence - either at an individual level, system level or both.
It is entirely plausible that a sort is nontrivial.
Downvotes notwithstanding, I stand by my claim that this is always the result of incompetence. Either at the small level (laziness) or at a larger scale (incompetent system design).
I've walked in to so many code based where very talented individuals have made incredibly complex systems, using all their technical know how of best practices & patterns, abstraction layers and facades ... and ignored the fact that all they needed was a three field form with a submit button.
It's not just worth knowing if you can, it's if you should.
The novice creates simple work because she isn't capable. The apprentice makes unnecessarily complex designs to impress. The master makes things simple because extra work would be unnecessary. Mastery isn't measured by much complexity has been added. Its measured by how much complexity has been taken away.
It is the finance department under the auspices of the CFO / the managing director that do. Those people are non-technical and don't understand the technology. Therefore, anything that is more modern than an abacus is pitched (and ususally later sold as well) to them as the best thing they will have ever seen.
Where I work, I also have to use a SAP system for expense reports. I can't even tell you what it's called, but the interface is basically just directly from SAP GUI(except embedded, very poorly, into a website) and every single interaction you perform results in a sync query to the backend, freezing the UI until you get a response.
The worst part is that no one really cares. SAP doesn't care. The users/companies that are stuck with SAP don't really care, or at least if they do, well, no one is going to spend valuable dev time on building their own internal expense registration platform(or whatever) just to fix something that sucks to use, but otherwise "works".
I also have to register my hours, being a consultant, and this also happens via some SAP system. One thing my current project manager told me recently is that the description field that we have to use to describe what work we did is just invisibly cut to 40 characters on the backend. I can freely type a whole essay describing what I did, but the pm reviewing will just see 40 characters.
Assuming that any sort of thought goes into most of SAP's software is like trying to reason about an insane person's behavior. It's completely pointless since there is no reason involved.
Unfortunately, I find it completely unsurprising that any SAP.* product is a dis-organized mess of a kludge, with no rationality evident anywhere.
Oh, and the CIO who foisted that pile of cr*p upon my organisation? She moved on shortly after SAP was implemented -- undoubtedly to foist SAP on some other poor unsuspecting org. I sure hope her SAP stock has tanked.
"We're looking for someone with experience with ASP and database performance improvements."
"You mean, ASP.net - not old school VB6 derived, interpreted - 'pretty cool for 1997' Active Server Pages - ASP?"
"Hey hey! You're the guy we want!"
Of course I would have taken the job if I'd known they'd be acquired.
edit: Huh, they were acquired in 2014? Ah well - it's like someone's MVP that made it out to production, then they made it big and that MVP kept being glommed onto.