My firm started to dabble with Concur shortly before the pandemic. I think they presented it in some way where it was through a travel agency they contracted with.

They had evidently selected one approved hotel to demonstrate the process and never bothered to go further.

The hotel was some four-star facility 40km from the office and twice the price of the economy tourist-tier hotels 5km away (which also featured free wi-fi and breakfast). So the remote workers continued to stay at those hotels and had to waste effort poking the system to do an override.

Fortunately, they still did it as "pay with your own account and we'll reimburse you" so you weren't stuck waiting for someone to approve a "can I pretty please spend less money and avoid an extra two hours of travel time per day?" request.

At my prior job, we were trying to do marketing for a SAP consultancy firm, and it was just surreal trying to get a grasp on it. How will potential customers know they're ready for SAP, or ready for your services in particular? Where do you reach out to potential buyers? What sort of messaging are you trying to target? I never got anything resembling an answer. I think they basically just wanted us to write the HTML for the terrible email blasts they sent to their existing lead pool.

After a thought, I suspect there's a particular corner of the C*O universe that treats Gartner reports as some sort of Death Note: a supernatural document where once someone's name appears in it, their entire destiny and fate is fully programmed out. I think they pretty much believed they could ride being in the Magic Quadrant for Nasal Hair Removal Advisory Services in 2006 into golden retirement.

For me it's stupid audit stuff. The date entered as the transaction is a date sooner than it posted and stupid stuff like that. I've mostly trained myself but I still get stuff bounced for little things like that. I've mostly trained myself to follow all the nit-picky rules carefully but I still miss from time to time. As I say, it's mostly not Concur itself which usually warns you of missing fields/receipts.

For me the real pain was paying vendors or freelancers. They all had to be input as an additional vendor, which is reasonable, but there were dozens of fields within each vendor, many of which were esoteric in they're labeling (likely a fault of implementation on our side). Then I would get a rejection via email that a particular field wasn't filled out (why wasn't it a required field?), and it was often hard to find where to input that field -- very unintuitive. I think I even had to go through a company admin once to add an associated email address to a vendor.

Beyond that, just the philosophy of creating a "purchase order" to pay a UX researcher who did 10 hours of work over three months seemed goofy -- purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid.

Andrew Dent and Elena Donio were consultants on the internal MSFT SAP implementation. They took what they learned about building friendly procurement and expense reporting SAP front end apps to Concur.