DPR Construction Inc., Jill Mitchell
"One thing we looked at when we looked at an expense reporting system was we wanted to find a company that was on the leading edge. Someone that had the same values we did, someone that was always looking ever forward. They’re looking at the new technology and they were looking at green. Greening out the process. And that’s the one thing that we really like about Concur is that it is green. Your receipts are all scanned and imaged. You don’t have that paper trail. The reports are automatically sent to your approver. You don’t have a piece of paper floating around that you’re trying to get back one place to another and especially when we’re all across the country, you don’t have that FedEx where you have that expense report, physical expense report FedEx’d to another office to be taken care of. Now with Concur, everything is online, it’s all electronic. The other nice thing about that is that it is a Web-based tool so you don’t have to be in our system to get onto Concur and actually do the work. You can do it from any Web-based computer that you can get on. It’s an Internet solution. It’s perfect for us and that’s the other thing that we looked for was something that’s easy to use, it was green, it was Internet based, it was easy for our approvers to use but it sill built in the security that we needed to protect our company."
"We have definitely saved on the return on investment in that we’ve limited down from seven processors to one processor. Now we don’t need the additional staff. We can use that staff and their talents in other places and do more benefits that way. Also I believe that putting in our American Express card and incorporating that into our expense tool that that has also saved us a considerable amount of because now everything is downloaded for our users. They have a better snapshot of what they’re using with their American Express card throughout the month because they can actually do their transactions as they come into the expense report instead of waiting until the end of the month and then saying oh my goodness I’ve spent three thousand dollars on what? Now they have a tool that they can use to track their expenses, see exactly where they’re spending and to curb some of that over-expending."
"Concur really helped us on the receipt side, imaging the receipts, scanning them, imaging them. That helped us tremendously. That was a problem that we had because as receipts they get old, they get unreadable, they get lost. All of that is taken care of now through the e-receipts and through scanning and attaching receipts. We don’t have to worry about that lost or wonder is it a valid receipt or not because it’s all right there from the e-receipts or from the scanned receipts."
"For us mobile is the next right step. We will be able to incorporate that right into our Blackberries and that’s the next thing that we’re looking for is we needed something that is mobile. We needed something that we can simply do along with our lifestyle and as we’re out on the job sites or we’re out with clients, we can now use that mobile capability to go out and do our transactions, attach the receipts by capturing them with our camera. It’s amazing."
"So if you’re not familiar with Concur Travel & Expense, here’s what I can say. I can tell you that Concur Travel & Expense is a program that is a tool that you can use to automate your spending and your processing for your travel. So now you can simply go online, go into the travel portion, book your ticket, book your car rental, have all that information downloaded automatically into your expense report. The advantage of the current interface is that now there’s so much smart search capability for you. There is so much right there at your finger tips. It takes no time to do your expense report especially with Smart Expenses that have that automatically match for you. Literally you can do your expense report in five minutes. It’s so much faster than the old way."
"You can do anything you want to with it. You can create a hundred different reports a hundred different ways and still just barely touch on all that you can do in that intelligence system. Concur Intelligence offers us a way to manipulate the data and so that we have so many different ways we can cut it across. We can show what our expenses are running for travel. We can do, show our expenses for air fare, get a better rate on the airlines, try and work with vendors on giving us a better spend."
"The other nice thing that I really like about Concur is that if they have a product that maybe it doesn’t quite fit our scenario that we need or maybe it’s a product that we’re using a similar product, they’re honest and up front with us to say you know this product really doesn’t work but we have this other product that works better for you that can do A, B and C that you can partner with what you currently have and make it a better solution and that’s what I really like, the honesty and the integrity from the people."
"Well I have definitely streamlined considerably in that before we used to have four, five, six different processors keying in expense reports. Now we have one expense processor. It takes her 15 to 20 minutes to run all of the expense reports and to get the money back out to the users. So it’s just shortened our processing time so much on the processing for our accounts payable side. And plus it really has streamline for our expense approvers because now they have everything at a touch of finger tips. They can look back and see, did I do that expense report a week ago, this looks like a transaction I approved already. Now they have everything right there for them to use."
"The biggest surprise that we’ve seen since we’ve implemented is basically the speed of our transactions. I think at first there was some push-back on how fast would this product work with our company. Would our end users have to do a little bit more work at the front because they’re no longer copying and pasting into an Excel spreadsheet? But how will that really lead the benefits to us down the road? And we’re finding that we save so much time with our processing, so much time with the approving, so much time with trying to dig those receipts back out. Now everything is right there at our finger tips."