Moneygram International, Kathy Follese
"I think how Concur has helped streamline our process is number one would be our audit rules. We are able to implement audit rules on different threshold dollar amounts or different things that we want to make sure we see no matter what and I think those audit rules have really helped us. A really good piece of advice that Concur gave us was don’t go crazy with audit rules. The more audit rules you have the more limited you’re going to be because everything will get stopped at some point. So, we took that advice because at first we’re like ‘oh great it’s audit rules. I have a thousand of them set up,’ and yeah, no. We scaled back quite a bit and we did our main ones, dollar amounts, the rate audit rule if you input a currency rate five percent over threshold we want to know why you’re doing that and in today’s world it could be viable. The exchange rates are changing every two seconds but it’s good to monitor that. I could be a fat finger typo putting in a much higher rate than you should have. So those are types of things that we decided what are our top things and Concur was able to give us that and to say streamline, be more effective. Being effective doesn’t mean having a thousand audit rules."
"I think the benefits for us have been the reporting, the Concur Intelligence, the receipts that are attached with the expense reports in real time. That’s helped us immensely. We have better control over expenses. We have better control matching those receipts to those expense lines, those transaction lines. We have a lot more flexibility reporting and creating ad hoc reporting for our management team. Anyone just in our internal department that has, we just didn’t have that before. So that’s been really one of our biggest benefits in how , how do I say this? It’s made our life easier just to have it right their at our finger tips and being able to create reports the way we like to see them and not how somebody else has told us to see those reports."
"I think that for anyone who is still using a manual process is you need to get over the fear of change. Change in any company large or small, medium-sized, a mom and pop shop is always scary. People do think you’re taking away jobs. People think you’re trying to streamline or automate things so you don’t need your employee but really what it does is it allows your employee to become more empowered because you’re allowing your employee to learn how to do things more efficiently, you’re saving time, you can have an employee do other things other than doing a manual process for expense reports. There’s error in everything we do but with an automation you can set those controls. You can find audit rules to analyze your data better. You have a better way to analyze it through the reporting process. When you do a manual process it’s a lot difficult to flip through a file and look at George’s expense report compared to John Doe’s, but when you automate you can run a report. And you can look not only at your employee’s spend but your supplier’s spend, your corporate card spend, your out of pocket spend, there’s just so many things I can probably go on for hours of why not to do a manual process."
"Our global solution for us really has benefited because now we can see all of our travel entertainment expenses. Before, we saw the US side of it, we had to wait for the global side, the London office to say ‘yup here are our transactions.’ We didn’t see any of the reports. We didn’t see any of their images. We just saw it through the general ledger. Now we can see the domestic side and their global expense reports from Africa, the Asias, the European countries and the receipts that are attached to them. So we can report now on a full travel expenditure versus just half of the globe."
"My counterpart for our global features I would have to say from London everything. They were using an Excel spreadsheet for all of the countries, manually ticking and tying each line to each receipt. There was no automation. So from a London perspective of this is a first look at an automated system. They’re able to bring in and use the approvals, the work flows that flow everything up to the London location and still get into their GL system before it comes over to the US. So I think overall I think everything about the system has benefited for our global structure. We just didn’t have it before."
"From a global standpoint one of the biggest things that stand up for us would be the ability to have expense reports in different rates, different currencies such as the Euro, the Pound, the Yen. Several different rates. Before in our old system on the domestic side we could only do US dollar period. We are now able to use Canadian dollar for reimbursement rate instead of just a US dollar and in our London office of course now we can reimburse in their home currencies which again, they just didn’t have before in an automated sense."
"I think you should investigate using Concur. I think if you are in the process of trying to decide, do I go with Concur or perhaps a different competitor, look at what’s going to fit for your company. Everything that I’ve seen with Concur, it doesn’t seem to matter what size your company is, it’s going to work for you. I think they let you configure it how you need it to be to fit your style of company. So I think it’s a very viable choice at any level. I think its well worth it. I think you should look into it and talk to Concur. They will answer every one of your questions and then some, almost to a point of ok, I get it."
"Life without Concur, if somebody was to say we have to take Concur away from you today, I would have to hire numerous people to accommodate all of the expense reports that come in to payables. I would have to go back to a manual process. I would feel like without Concur I’d be going back maybe a century. It would just be a throw-back in time starting and re-inventing the wheel. And I don’t need to do that when I’ve got Concur. That’s my wheel. It just keeps spinning."
"What’s really helped us is the reporting, the visibility or receipts right there real time. The auditing that we can do in-house. Just, it’s all in one place. It’s all a one-stop shop. I think the greatest surprise for us has been the real time images that are attached to those expense reports and the real time reporting that we get from Concur Intelligence and using those ad hoc reports to help drive costs down and to let management know where we’re spending their dollars."
"I love Concur Intelligence.The day I got it, December 5, I’ll never forget. I went out there, I looked for it, I saw it. I started creating reports immediately. I’m used to that platform, we use it internally anyways with Oracle but I was able to create I don’t know, a half a dozen reports right off the bat in about 20 minutes. Now granted I had some comfort level with the actual platform but I can change those reports the way that I want to see them and how I want to see them. I can use the standard ones, they do provide the standard reports, I have looked at those but I love the fact that now if somebody says, can you run a report to show me everything in cost center 5504 from January 1 to March 2, I can do that. It’s not a struggle any more. Concur Intelligence for me has been a God send. I send out month-end reports to the various different cost centers now, this is where you’re at. They don’t have sticker shock when they get their P&L’s. They know, these are my actual expenses that are going to be heading, so it’s just been a great tool. I think that’s the best feature I loved about Concur actually from the back office perspective."
"The reason why we needed Concur to be available online and on demand is because we have a lot of travelers. The nature of our business is to work with our agents. Those are our clients and we need to be there and we need to have them see us. So therefore we have a lot of travel. And it’s a global travel, it’s not just across the city line. So those features for Concur enable our travelers to stay on top of their expenses, report their expenses accordingly within policy, within control and be done. We try to keep it simple."
"I think a benefit of a user conference is really to brain storm. I really do, I think it’s the management of Concur to listen. It’s their opportunity to hear us who handle this application every single day. I think they do listen. I think a user conference also allows you to meet your own peers across the country who again may be going through the same situation, same questions even that you may be having. Seeing somebody face to face, putting a face with that name is so much more stronger in any kind of a relationship so I think that’s important. I think it’s to go face to face, I think it’s to be able to meet the executive team. I saw Raj in a couple of the sessions that I sat in and I was like wow, this guy is sitting in one of these sessions. I was really impressed by that. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody else at that level sit through some of these sessions but I saw him in so it’s like, you know he’s coming down to the people to say ok what can we do better, what is working, what isn’t working because there are areas that you guys are improving on, I think they’re getting there but like any company there’s always going to be challenges. That’s what a company does, find solutions for those challenges."