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Comment by andrei_says_ | Hacker News Reader

I work in a corporate environment and I also write software -- both external and internal tools. My intolerance to unnecessary pain is one of the main driving forces in creating software-based tools.

The amount of pain inflicted on employees by enterprise solutions of various kinds is immeasurable. As a developer, I squirm witnessing so much unnecessary work and discomfort associated with simple tasks.

For example, even in 2020, managing expenses is so painful that employees consider not expending their spending.

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> managing expenses is so painful that employees consider not expending their spending

That's not a bug for some companies, who would prefer to not reimburse you.

Managing expenses is only a pain because my company doesn’t trust me when I tell them I spent $20 on a meal. And have to give them both a digital, and then physical (signed!) receipt.

It's annoying and could probably be made easier, but these things are required by law. Also, not everyone can be trusted and it's not easy to tell.

No, but there are solutions that involve giving people a fixed amount of money every month for these small expenses (or a fixed amount per day for longer business trips).

I would assume most companies use per diem for business trips. Agree that it would be great with something similar for other small expenses.

But none the less, all company expenses needs to be verifiable by some kind of receipt in the accounting to be legal. At least thats how it works in my country. So someone has to enter that into some sort of system, ideally the economy people would take care of that.

Definitely not. We require digital images only, and not even an image is required for corporate card transactions under a limit.

I agree with everything you say, except the last bit.

You can't believe people aren't aware that concur is a pita and hence it reduces expense valid expense submission...

Concur is a pleasure compared to some internal SAP-based expense reporting systems I’ve used.

Concur, especially on mobile is pretty good. It’s a lot better than every single project manager tool that I have ever used.

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