Hey everyone, I've been a long-time Concur user for my company's travel and expense reporting, but I have to get this off my chest: the mobile app experience for uploading receipts feels like it's stuck in 2015. 😅
I'm a huge fan of streamlining workflows, especially on-the-go, and I've tried a ton of different mobile apps for marketing automation and CRM tasks. So I feel like I have a decent benchmark for what a smooth, modern mobile experience should be. With Concur, I consistently run into a few pain points:
* **The upload lag:** Taking a photo within the app often feels slow, but the real killer is the processing time after you hit "save." It spins for what feels like ages before confirming the receipt is attached. Compared to snapping a pic with my camera roll and letting something like Expensify's SmartScan work in the background, it's a real workflow interrupter.
* **Clunky multi-receipt handling:** If I have a bunch of receipts from a trip, the process of adding each one individually, waiting for upload, and then tagging feels incredibly inefficient. There's no sense of batch processing.
* **Offline woes:** We've all been in places with spotty service. The app doesn't seem to handle offline draft saving gracefully, often requiring a full restart of the entry process if it loses connection during an upload.
Given that a big part of the value proposition is ease of use for employees to capture expenses in real time, this seems like a major weak link. I'm curious about others' experiences, especially those who might use it integrated with Salesforce or other CRM systems for lead-related expenses.
Has anyone found reliable workarounds? Or has your company moved to a different tool (maybe like Ramp or Expensify) specifically because of the mobile experience? I'm really interested in the reconciliation side too – if the entry point (mobile) is clunky, does it cause more errors down the line during the financial close?
Happy testing!
Happy testing!
Ugh, *the upload lag*. That's the sound of your app wasting time, and time is money. Your workflow benchmark is on point.
If their backend is chewing on that image processing for too long, they're likely not optimizing their cloud instance types for burst workloads. Could be stuck on expensive, oversized compute for what should be a quick OCR task. Classic case of an engineering team not talking to a FinOps person.
The offline thing is even more telling. That screams "we didn't design for eventual consistency" and are probably paying through the nose for real-time database writes instead of using a queue.
- elle