Concur Invoice: A wish list
Overview
As a product consultant, I’m always ready to take the good with the not-so-good. No product is perfect, but part of any product implementation is knowing not just what the product does, but what it doesn’t do.
With that in mind, I’ve compiled the following wish list of items I wish Concur Invoice handled, or handled better. This post comes with a little over a year of hands-on experience deploying Concur Invoice as well as administrating the solution. You’ll note that the bulk of these deal with collaboration and reporting, two of the most important aspects of an operations-focused products.
Can I get a Permlink?
Even though Concur is a cloud-hosted, web-based product, it doesn’t support unique URLs for it’s core entities. Sounds geeky, but to put it in more understandable terms, every invoice (or expense report, if you’re using that module) lacks a unique web URL.
This means sharing an invoice (‘hey, can you go take a look at why the coding is wrong on this one’) is difficult. Each user has to search for that particular invoice using invoice number, increasing friction and making it more difficult to create a single playing field for everyone.
A Robust Data Visibility Model
In my experience, it is common for multiple parties in a department to work on invoices collaboratively. This means that very often, department member ‘Karen’ would like to see invoices that ‘Tom’ is working on, and potentially even by co-editing that invoice. Moreover, after Karen submits it, Tom might like to take a look at the invoice for any number of reasons.
Unfortunately, Concur does not support peer-visibility of invoices, except through reporting, and even then, it can be difficult. The ability to give multiple parties visibility into invoices, especially by vendor, would be a game-changer.
Note that one workaround for this is proxy access - but this isn’t a scalable solution in a large organization and creates additional work for any individual user.
Timely Reporting
As any one who has worked with Concur knows, the product relies on a separate data warehouse for reporting. Specifically, Cognos is the solution at hand, for better or worse. As such, the warehouse itself only refreshes once every 24 hours, overnight.
While it’s true that invoicing isn’t necessarily a fast-paced aspect of business operations, it hasn’t been unusual for a staff member to desire a complete look at the current state of invoices in the department. If that user isn’t a Processor with advanced querying permissions, they are out of luck, until the next morning.
Commenting
Concur allows the user to make a comment, although the field where comments are typed is tiny. This sends a message - “keep it brief!” It makes comments feel unimportant to the user, when in fact the communication around an invoice is as important as the invoice itself.
Moreover, comment visibility is also challenging. Concur requires you to add a custom exception to alert the user that a comment even exists - and then, to see the comment, you need to click to a “Comments” menu option.
Why not bring collaboration front-and-center? Systems like Salesforce allow to embed a chatter feed in a sidebar, which can be a tremendous value add. Right now, Concur isn’t punching in the same weight class when it comes to collaboration, and this is a great example.
Conclusions
Concur Invoice is a powerful tool that can transform your invoicing processes; be aware of some of its limitations surrounding visibility and collaboration when planning your implementation.
