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Emcee Insight: What to Expect at This Year’s Fusion

Guest Blogger — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:08:04 +0000

Adam Harris is the Director of Business Development at Concur. In 2012, he debuted as emcee of Fusion, our annual client conference. And he’s rocking the mic again next month for Fusion 2013 in Las Vegas!

Last year, on the balcony of the John Lennon Suite at the Hard Rock in Orlando, a client let me shave his head and then style a word into his hair: rad. He did it in the spirit of the conference’s social event, the Totally Awesome 80s Party. But for me, and at the risk of sounding like a high school skateboarder, it symbolized the spirit of our entire conference. Fusion is totally rad. The best part is meeting clients I’ve been working with over the years, connecting in the camaraderie of our industry. Fusion is a jam-packed week with sessions, trainings and fun – and sometimes a new hairstyle! As emcee, there are a few things to look forward to at Fusion 2013:

Expect energy!

Especially in the morning – maybe a couple notches down from Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam. But I’ll be back in the crowd asking the audience questions and pleading for your input. Help me out! I’d also like to sit down next to some unsuspecting client and, without you knowing, eat some of your breakfast. I’m not sure why, it just sounds like a challenge… watch your bacon.

Receptions, keynotes and one big party

If you are new to Fusion, definitely go to the First Timers’ Reception on Tuesday eventing – you’ll meet all of your peers in the same boat and it’s an easy place to make friends. The opening keynotes with our co-founders really set the tone for the week. The industry vision of Steve, Raj and Mike is always energizing and gives us an idea of where we’re headed next. And the client party at Tao is going to be quite the soiree. Dress to impress!

The Fusion Wave

Our Concur community has so much knowledge and experience that it seems natural we use the Fusion Wave to share what we’re learning in real-time. Twitter is the easiest and best way to exchange info, get updates and interact with others during Fusion. The Wave is easy: Tweet and repeat. I’ll be sharing out my experiences at Fusion using @Concur and #CF2013 – I’d love to hear what you think, too! Tweet me at @AdamH10.

Connect with Concur

Fusion was created for you. We have more than 200 Concur employees at Fusion to ensure our clients are getting what they need. If you have a question – ask it! If you have a need – call it out! If you need a date to accompany you to the craps tables… hey, I’m in. We are here to serve you this week, but we also want to know you as a friend. So, introduce yourself! You’ll be surprised at the friendships that may flourish beyond your T&E system. I’m looking forward to meeting you in Las Vegas – it’s going to be rad! If you have any questions beforehand, give me a shout-out on Twitter @AdamH10 and loop in #CF2013 to get started on the Wave!

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The Social (Fusion) Network: Why It Rocks to Ride the Wave

Guest Blogger — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:30:46 +0000

Kelly Goodman is an Expense Management Specialist at the Florida Virtual School. Last year she Tweeted up a storm and won the 2012 Fusion Wave’s grand prize: free registration to this year’s Fusion in Las Vegas.

Last year was my first time attending Fusion and my opportunity to join in on social networking fun – the Fusion Wave, Concur’s conference Tweet-a-thon. I decided to participate in the Fusion Wave because I rarely turn down a challenge and wanted to win the grand prize – and I did! Honestly, I have never been a big Twitter user. But last year’s conference was in my hometown and I knew I’d have a better chance of convincing my manager to let me travel to this year’s conference if I won – so I Tweeted pictures and session updates and it really helped me stay engaged in the topics.

Kelly and Gillian

Repeating concepts can help you learn them better. The Wave was great because Tweeting the new things I was learning helped them stick in my brain. And it was great to see other people’s ideas, especially during a big event like Fusion where everyone is attending different sessions and gaining unique insights. Twitter is a really valuable way to see everyone’s perspective in real time, in one place. There’s no reason not to participate in the #CF2013 Wave! You may just have a little more fun, meet a few more people and gain a bit more knowledge. And who knows? You might just win! (But I’ll be trying, too!) Want to ride the Fusion Wave at #CF2013? Here’s how.

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A Conference to Remember: Top Takeaways from Concur Fusion

Guest Blogger — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:30:12 +0000

For me, Fusion is all about sharing knowledge, networking and connecting with my Concur contacts. I’ve attended Fusion for three out of the last four years, and the event is always memorable for me for a few different reasons.

Industry insight

I usually look forward to the Roadmap sessions at Fusion the most because I like to see what the vision for Concur will for the coming year. To hear what Steve Singh and Rajeev Singh talk about in their keynotes – where they want to take the company, their vision of the T&E trends – their discussions have always been valuable for me. Our company is trending more toward international travel as each year passes. That presents new challenges for us, and I’m interested in hearing advice from Concur leaders, as well as my peers, as we grow into global markets at Fusion 2013.

Earning expertise

Over the years that I’ve been attending Fusion, I’ve gone from the person asking all the questions of my peers to the one giving all the answers. For instance, in 2011, I was a session speaker at “Our Experience with End to End Travel & Expense” for the first time and recorded my first video for Concur Star. I realized the connections I made at Fusion and the stories we shared there have affected my expertise as a Concur user. Now I’m the mature, wise user. But I still have lots to learn – that’s why I’m looking forward to Fusion 2013. It’s the perfect place to get nearly every question you might have about the Concur product answered, and expand your knowledge base.

Personal connections

For those who have never attended Fusion, I think it’s so important to go and meet the people behind the emails and releases. Talk with them. See the passion for their work in person. This year, I’m hoping to get caught up on networking and meet my new client services managers in Las Vegas. Putting a face with an email address is important. Nothing substitutes personal connections. And for me, having my biggest supporters – Travel and Transport’s Margie Cope and Tim Arnold – at every Fusion conference has been a huge morale boost. They even sat in the front row of my speaker session! That’s support and dedication. They are very much a part of my Concur experience. I always look forward to the vision that Concur presents for the future. Having missed Fusion in 2012, it’s time for me to reconnect to that industry insight and my peers. Based on my past experiences at Fusion, it’s a great event for thought leadership, honing your technical skills and making friends. Look for me at #CF2013! Mike Sesin has been Manager of Business Information Systems at Merkle for four years. Have you registered for Fusion in Las Vegas? There’s still time to get a discount on your registration. Register for $995 until March 15^th.

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Holiday Rush: 6 Tips to Get Through the “Busiest Expense Day”

Guest Blogger — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:00:07 +0000

At our accounting firm, we actually embrace and conquer the “Busiest Expense Day” and help our clients to do exactly that, too. A big part of our success comes from automating and streamlining the expensing process to prevent loss and maintain order. But we also have a few more tricks up our sleeves, too. Even though it falls on a Wednesday this year, December 19 is a date I like to mark on the calendar as “Black Friday” for our office. It can get crazy – employees who have been otherwise forgetful to file their expense reports suddenly remember and submit everything at once. Maybe it’s the holiday rush that reminds them; or, maybe it’s the promise of reimbursement before vacations start. Either way, we plan ahead for the Busiest Day with a few simple tricks:

Tip #1: Make it fun and festive

Our office turns the Busiest Expense Day into a real festival, although our party is more about reconciliation than knocking back nog. Still, we usually bring in meals for everyone and host an unofficial “happy hour” near the office to decompress.

Tip #2: Holler a little. Go on

Since our department is the last link in the chain, and typically the most chaotic, I suggest accountants and approvers do something out of the ordinary: wear jeans, bring in decorations, take 10 seconds to collectively scream on the top of your lungs – anything that will make you smile, even if it is only for a moment.

Tip #3: Staff up

We look at December 19 as we do all other deadlines and ensure our employees are available and cross-trained. My motto is to expect the unexpected and have additional, trained staff prepared to lend a hand, just in case. We remind everyone to take a few deep breaths and make preparations for a longer day than usual.

Tip #4: Ready resources for approvers

In the days prior, we suggest that approvers have a refresher discussion and training check-in with employees about expense and procedures. I recommend visiting staff first thing in the morning to ensure everything they need to submit complete and accurate reports is in their hands. I also think it’s vital that employees are available, after they submit their reports, for follow-up questions or to provide materials they may have inadvertently omitted.

Tip #5: Account for accountants

There are a few things you can do in advance of the Busiest Expense Day to help this otherwise hectic day run smoothly for your CPAs. First, ask that your IT personnel be available on call if there are computer issues. Then, ask managers or owners to be around if something unusual arises, or approvers need guidance. I also suggest scheduling a few people to come in later in the day, to break up the work.

Tip #6: Strength for small business

With about 30 employees, our firm is relatively small. Our top managers are key components in coping with the Busiest Expense Day. Level-headedness, decisiveness and guidance are crucial at times of stress, even for the most seasoned and independent employee. Make this the one day you don’t allow for exceptions or debate! Remind your employees that they can and should ask for help if it is needed, but have extra resources on call if things aren’t going the way you expected. As accountants and business consultants, our focus is on efficiency and timeliness. So on December 19, we provide on-site and remote assistance to our clients if they need an extra hand. After all, a little planning, preparation and levity helps us all get through the Busiest Expense Day of the Year. Andrew Presti, pictured above on the left, is general manager of Presti & Naegele. He is also a member of the Concur Advisor Program.

Looking for ways to improve your expense reporting process? Look no further. Start your free trial.

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The Best Practice: How PMI Mortgage Encourages Policy Compliance

Guest Blogger — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:00:29 +0000

Want to know how your peers manage day-to-day challenges in travel and expense? Concur is sharing the best practice stories of its clients about everything from travel booking to policy enforcement. From the technology industry to the education field, the process varies – this is how they do it.

Company: PMI Mortgage Insurance Co. Industry: Financial services Overview: PMI Mortgage provides residential mortgage insurance coverage in the United States. How they do it: Policy compliance

Policy compliance doesn’t always sound like the most popular job in the office – none of the employees want me contacting them because they know they’ve done something they shouldn’t have. But in the beginning, I dealt with travel policy compliance issues daily. As people became more educated about our policies, the problems came weekly, then monthly, and now I deal with compliance on a rare occasion.

Tricks of the trade

People always need to believe that you are not out to get them when they have gone out of compliance. The mantra, “You attract more bees with honey”? It’s always worked for me. However, if they are repeat offenders then you have to move to a much harsher approach and get folks involved who can really help you drive the point home. I always made sure everything was documented in email so I could show management that I had worked with their employee multiple times to correct the behavior – at a certain point, I needed them to take over, understanding the history of the situation.

Communicating the policy

We have an internal website that we built a whole travel page on. On that site we listed our policy as a manual, and then put some high level “quick tips” on that page. This gave folks a quick reminder at a glance. Additionally, we worked closely with our TMC to build a landing page that would look similar to our internal website page. Our policy enforcement generally works. When employees used to go out of compliance, the usual suspect was air travel. But mandating the use of our travel management company (TMC) made that problem obsolete. These days, people go out of policy with meals. We had a situation where employees were spending money like water on very elaborate meals with either their colleagues or customers. It became a huge issue one quarter and we had to have some very difficult discussions with people around their spending habits while on the road. As a result, we don’t incentivize our policy enforcement. Instead, we use the threat of non-payment as encouragement. In essence, that’s our incentive.

Challenges

Our biggest challenge has been getting buy-in from the top down. Most of our issues with non-compliant employees had been pre-approved by managers. It took some additional approvals within Concur before we found evidence of items being out of policy. It was only after discovering this that we could really hone in on the culprit – usually managers who didn’t understand the policy either. Compliance has to be something that all management has bought into or it will never work. People will push the envelope and you have to have the ability to run things up the food chain and be supported, or your policy will never accomplish what was intended.

Successes

For PMI Mortgage, additional approvals within Concur really helped drive home the compliance issue. Peer pressure can be very useful when you are trying to correct behavior that is spinning the wrong way! Additionally, when we finally put a TMC in place and mandated the use of that TMC helped drive the compliance point home for employees. Before they were free to do whatever they wanted and no one really policed it – now, we’re all over it!

Lisa and her daughter

Lisa Kemper has been the Senior Corporate Services Specialist at PMI Mortgage for 10 years.

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The Best Practice: How Safety-Kleen Manages Travel

Guest Blogger — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 23:42:01 +0000

Want to know how your peers manage day-to-day challenges in travel and expense? Concur is sharing the best practice stories of its clients about everything from travel booking to policy enforcement. From the technology industry to the education field, the process varies – this is how they do it.

Company: Safety-Kleen Systems, Inc. Industry: Environmental Sciences Overview: Safety-Kleen helps businesses cope with the task of staying green. From cleaning paint guns and printing presses, to collecting and recycling automotive or industrial waste, the company helps manage waste safely. How they do it: Managing travel I enjoy working in travel because it’s dynamic environment that’s always on the move. To keep up, it’s important to keep a handle on all the changes in the business travel industry – by keeping an eye on industry news, getting feedback from employees and talking with peers.

Best practices

My best tip for managing travel is to check in with colleagues – attending events like Fusion is a good start, but it’s more effective to connect with people in your own backyard. I encourage Concur users to attend group meetings to find out some of the issues they’re facing. For instance, I attend a user group in Dallas that meets once a quarter that always includes a presentation of a challenge, and an open discussion of creative solutions. At our last meeting, I gave a presentation about audit rules and led the discussion that resulted in a lot of good ideas. Hearing about other people’s experiences managing travel has always been valuable to me.

Managing travel

At Safety-Kleen, we have a centralized travel process that uses Concur to manage our travel and expense system. We also employ Carlson as our travel agency with Concur Travel, where we book all of our travel – airfare, hotels and car rentals. We mandate that our business travelers use Concur because we’ve found it’s an effective way to reduce costs.

Industry changes

In the last five years, Safety-Kleen has seen a big shift in the technology our road warriors use. Smartphones, tablets and other devices are used for travel that never existed before. It’s our challenge to keep up with all of these technological shifts, though my job is made easier with integration – when Concur Travel was integrated with Concur Expense, it strengthened our travel management process.

Tricks of the trade

My best trick is to learn how to customize Cognos. I have taken Cognos’ standard reports and tailored them for Safety-Kleen’s unique needs. For example, for our total report on employees, I added in the employee number and cost center as fields to run a more complete report. I also run a report on employees by date and type total, to supplement a reporting package I do every month. We are able to manage our policy better by running a report that identifies unused tickets – airfare our employees may have purchased and paid for, but never actually used. All of these things combined make my job easier, and give us a better handle on managing travel. Thomas Lyman has been director of Accounts Payable at Safety-Kleen for seven years.

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The Best Practice: Lumension Security on Expense Reports

Guest Blogger — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 08:09:00 +0000

Want to know how your peers manage day-to-day challenges in travel and expense? Concur is sharing the best practice stories of its clients about everything from travel booking to policy enforcement. From the technology industry to the education field – this is how they do it.

Company: Lumension Security, Inc.

Industry: Technology

Overview: Lumension Security develops, integrates and markets security software. The company helps businesses protect vital information and manage risks across networks.

How they do it: Expense Reports

Expense reports

We ask our employees to submit expense reports on a weekly basis, and we reimburse weekly, too. All reports are routed to the employee’s manager for approval, which is then sent to accounting for review. We do a spot check on receipts, approve the reports and process reimbursement through Concur Pay.

After the reimbursement is run, we use the Concur comma-separated values (CSV) file to extract a journal entry, and we process and upload them to Netsuite. Employees typically submit their reports each week, but our international employees submit only twice per month.

Tricks for travelers overseas

We use Concur for our Luxembourg and UK travelers. We have programmed in our travel policy, and also added in categories associated with specific value-added tax (VAT) rules.

For example, Luxembourg has a much more complex VAT set-up than the UK. In Luxembourg, their VAT levels vary depending on what you buy. We use the flexibility of the drop down menus for our travelers to select the appropriate type of expense. They’ll always select the correct corresponding tax percentage because we have programmed Luxembourg’s intricate VAT percentages into Concur.

In the UK, there is only one VAT percentage. We use Concur to code the VAT to the correct GL account in Netsuite. At Lumension, we have developed our own Netsuite reports for VAT, since the standard reports cannot capture the journal entry type associated with the Concur upload that we do.

It took us a while to discover all of the things our businesses travelers needed, but in the end, both Concur and Netsuite were very flexible tools and we were able to make the process work for us.

Top tip: keep it simple

We don’t try to make things too detailed or overly complicated for our travelers. We try to make the system as user-friendly as possible. For instance, we only require receipts on expenses over $25. When issues arise, we remain customer-focused and provide training when a new salesperson joins the company to avoid problems.

If we keep things easy for our employees, we get expense reports submitted accurately and quickly – which is the end-goal of the finance department!

Susan Rossi has been vice president, worldwide controller at Lumension Security for five years.

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The Best Practice: How Nexus IS Does Expense Reports

Guest Blogger — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:08:25 +0000

Want to know how your peers manage day-to-day challenges in travel and expense? Concur is sharing the best practice stories of its clients about everything from travel booking to policy enforcement. From the technology industry to the education field, the process varies – this is how they do it.

Company: Nexus IS, Inc.

Industry: Advanced Technology in Voice and Data Communications

Overview: Nexus designs, builds and supports complete end-to-end technology solutions that integrate four distinct yet complementary architectures: collaboration, data center, borderless networks, and managed services.

How they do it: Expense Reports

By Christina Murphy, guest blogger

I work with a great group of people. Everyone is innovative, creative, intelligent, driven, and family oriented. I am treated like family at this company and it makes me feel good about coming to work every day. I don’t just have a job; I have friends and family here at Nexus.

As an Advanced Technology organization, we have our own set of unique needs from our business travelers. My role is to support those employees before, during and after every business trip.

Best practices

The best practice I found in managing expense reports is to make sure your organization has a travel and expense policy handbook that’s crystal clear and easy to communicate to all levels of the company. It’s also very important to not play favorites with employees, like making policy exceptions for some and not others. When it comes to making those types of decisions, I recommend leaving it up to the executive management to decide.

Expense reports

At Nexus, our expense reporting process is really quite simple. An employee’s manager reviews expenses before they come to the back office for a final audit. They are paid out on a weekly basis via ADP payroll. I approve everything during the week, up until Friday. Then I close the batch at 5 p.m. and send it off to human resources to submit payment requests.

I give the final audit on the reports, based on our Travel & Expense Policy guidelines. If a report is questionable or out-of-policy, I send it back to the employee for further explanation. Sometimes there are cases when an employee’s expense report needs to be routed to a vice president or our COO if a single line item on the report or the total amount exceeds the policy threshold – at Nexus, our executive team prefers to monitor the high dollar reports and review them before I give the final audit, which Concur is set up to do automatically for us.

Approvals process

My review of the reports comes at the tail end of the approval process. I often catch mistakes that are out of policy and can be missed by other levels of management. This has proven to be a successful process. In a perfect world, we expect all our managers to thoroughly review their employees’ expense reports, but that doesn’t always happen. Inadvertently, things can still be overlooked.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake I catch is an employee not attaching itemized receipts to accompany their meal and entertainment expenses. While it’s clearly outlined in our policy handbook, it is a bit difficult to make everyone in the organization actually take time to sit down and get to know this policy in detail – especially ones who are constantly on the road.

Tricks of the trade

The trick is to make sure you have a great relationship with employees as the travel coordinator. It makes it much easier to explain policy and get it enforced when your employees know you, like you, and respect your position in the organization. I don’t want them to look at me as the “Expense Police” – rather someone who is upholding company policy, yet is always there to help.

Christina Murphy has been a corporate travel coordinator for Nexus for more than five years.

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3 Tips on Managing International Expense Reporting

Guest Blogger — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:11:57 +0000

If you or your business have international offices or overseas opportunities, you know that expense reporting can take on a whole new level of complication when an international component is added to it. The following blog post from High Street Partners provides some insight on the kinds of information you should have before you go.

Managing the expense reports of the employees of your company in one country can be complex in itself. But if your business has international operations in several countries, each with different languages and currencies, suddenly, the work is multiplied.

If you’re trying to get a grip on managing international expense reporting for your company, here are three things to keep in mind.

Mind the VAT. IVA, MOMS, TVA, GST: Whatever you name it, value-added tax (VAT) is a reality of doing business overseas. And if your expense reports don’t provide consideration for VAT, your business may end up paying significant costs that could have potentially been reclaimed.
Stay compliant. Whether it’s Sarbanes-Oxley in the U.S. or the U.K. Finance Act, there are important compliance requirements to keep in mind when managing international expenses. Having clear, detailed reports that outline exactly what was spent where make compliance simple and life much easier in the event of an audit.
Watch for fraud. Did you know that expense report fraud accounts for 15 percent of total fraud? Add an overseas employee with little oversight into the mix, and it’s easy to see the potential. Protect against the various types of fraud by requiring original documentation, setting expense limits and conducting companywide audits.

High Street Partners is the leader in international business services, offering innovative, technology-enabled business solutions that simplify the management and control of international operations.

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