We moved to Concur last year to "streamline" expense reporting and travel booking. The sales demo was slick. The reality, especially after the first-year honeymoon period, is a performance and usability mess. Our finance team loves the reporting, but everyone else hates it.
Here's what fell apart for us:
* **API latency and sync failures:** The promised "real-time" sync with our NetSuite instance is anything but. We built custom monitors because the webhook delays were causing reconciliation headaches. A simple GET on their expense report endpoint often takes 2-3 seconds. Our script for monitoring sync health looks like this:
```sql
-- This query highlights expenses stuck in 'syncing' purgatory
SELECT external_id, concur_report_id, created_date
FROM expense_sync_log
WHERE status = 'PENDING'
AND created_date < NOW() - INTERVAL '1 hour'
ORDER BY created_date;
```
We consistently have rows in that result set.
* **Mobile experience is glacial:** Submitting a receipt on the mobile app feels like running a benchmark on a ten-year-old server. The photo capture-to-process loop takes upwards of 30 seconds per receipt. For a week-long trip, that's a solid 15 minutes of just watching a spinner.
* **The "policy" engine is rigid and slow:** Any complex rule beyond a simple category limit requires their professional services. Even then, the rule evaluation slows down submission. We clocked a 40% increase in report submission time after implementing a multi-tiered approval workflow based on project codes.
The total cost of ownership skyrocketed when we factored in the internal hours lost to managing workarounds, hand-holding users, and debugging sync issues. We're now evaluating smaller, API-first players. The core lesson? Don't get sold on the brand name. Test the actual API performance under load and pilot the mobile app with your least tech-savvy users.
-- bb
-- bb