We used Excel based expense reporting for years, it takes me much less time to assemble my reports on concur, I rather like it, its the least of all evils.
A) Scan everything
B) figure out what portion of it needed expensed
C) Fill out expense form
D) send to my manager for approval
After it was sent off, Accounting might just decide to not pay it because no receipt for the coin-op laundry machine I used, when I pointed out it was coin-op laundry, they just shrugged, and then approved it. Meanwhile, while they dicker I'm sitting on multiple thousands of dollars of expenses.
Other issues were making sure I had the correct form, multiple approvals, etc. Now before this process, we used all the same forms but printed out.
Using Concur -
A) the the app to scan my receipts
B) attach receipts to company card expenses
C) deal with some drop downs for some stuff concur has flagged out of process
D) send to manager
Now I lost my per-diem in this, but they cover everything now with the exception of tips to the housekeeper (I've just not tried it yet).
The downside is any payments from the company now take multiple weeks, lol.
Using the excel process, would take me about 1-1.5 hours per week of travel, under Concur its about a about .5-.75 hours per week of travel.
My last employer used some stupid Oracle system to audit the hell out of everything. One time I was flagged for taking a suboptimal route that increased toll expense by $3. Hilarious. I spent like 1.5 hours @ $90 on justification of $3.
Feels like a lot of the goal in these systems is to try enforce rules that no person expense manager could try insist on with a straight face. If even 10% of the company gets scared off by the justification demand and books the inconvenient option, that's $20k/yr saved.
Which is still probably peanuts compared to what Concur costs, but that cost is somebody else's problem to the finance person who gets to claim savings on annual flight costs.
Somebody got fed up and did a general purpose XLS import library, but some sites forbid you using it.
We had some hellish “use Excel as an interface to ‘real SAP’ process” for budgeting/headcount planning and it was almost utility-free for us as users. Even doing copy/paste would break parts of it, but invisibly to the user in real-time but would fail on import days/weeks later.
Of course you can partially prepare for it by making a file where users have to pick things like town name from a scroll down list (hope your list has every town), but they still can get "creative" and mess it up.