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Software horror show: SAP Concur

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141–150 of 204 posts

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#141

Post by Camillo »

I use the Concur app to scan receipts for travel expenses. It has a useful feature called "ExpenseIt" (maybe a company they acquired?) that parses the receipt photo, finds the expense amount, and automatically files it in the current expense report. The UI is a bit jarring: you select your receipt, press the button, and after a few seconds it disappears. It doesn't take you to the expense it has created for it in the expense report, or offer such a link. But there is a fixed message saying "can't find your expenses? they were placed in the report".

...except that, every once in a while, the receipt just disappears. The receipt picture is gone, but there is no corresponding expense created in any report. As far as I could figure out, it was simply deleted.

So, whenever you scan a receipt, you have to manually track it down to the report where it placed it, to make sure it actually went somewhere and did not get deleted. Or you keep all your paper receipts and spend two hours going through them after the trip.

I tried filing a bug report but quickly realized it was impossible.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#142

Post by inkyoto »

teemab wrote: post #68
lepus wrote: post #41

Concur's backend is typical of a slow moving industry that works with old awkward systems like airlines. It's a shitshow of business logic and 20 year old legacy code that would be a long expensive nightmare to rewrite for little actual profit so no manager would ever approve of such an endeavor. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mess of queries involved with this search such that trying to do a real sort of the…

It’s also very possible this list is configured by the IT department that purchased Concur. If this list is always set by purchaser configuration, not sorting kind of makes.

The IT department does not make purchases such as Concur as it is way out of their core competency.

It is the finance department under the auspices of the CFO / the managing director that do. Those people are non-technical and don't understand the technology. Therefore, anything that is more modern than an abacus is pitched (and ususally later sold as well) to them as the best thing they will have ever seen.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#143

Post by vzqx »

topaz0 wrote: post #140
asyncscrum wrote: post #91

My favorite fight search tool was hipmunk. Their 'agony' sort was my favorite feature in any software ever. SAP bought them, and I was so hopeful that Concur would bake this into their god awful app that I had to use for work. No luck. RIP Hipmunk.

What is "agony sort"?

According to [1], it sorted flights by an "agony" metric which was a combination of price, duration, and number of stops.

[1] https://www.afar.com/magazine/hipmunk-is-shutting-down-heres...

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#144

Post by msla »

HyperSane wrote: post #107
acdha wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even know how to rationalize this anymore. Enterprise IT is like that because the buyer never uses it and often assumes anyone complaining is just whiny/lazy. A previous employer had a massive outage with an expensive ’Orrible reporting application: down for weeks, developers expecting them to repair corrupted data, etc. They paid many millions of dollars to license that app and millions more for “support”,…

Name and shame, that is just ridiculous.

Oracle, because I hate this childishness.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#146

Post by doktorhladnjak »

jvanderbot wrote: post #134
skissane wrote: post #102

At my old job, I was jealous of people at other companies who got to use Concur. Whatever Concur's flaws may be, the system we had was obviously worse. "Wow, you take a photo with your phone and it goes in an app? Wish we had an app. Instead I have to submit it on a website, print the cover page as a PDF, collect all my receipts as further PDFs, merge the PDFs, and then send them via email with a single PDF attachmen…

At one of my two career employers, to create an electronic deposit for your paychecks you had to: 1. Email payroll asking for the right form (an excel sheet would arrive via email) 2. fill out that excel sheet that had no validation at all, just formatting. you enter your bank info, amount, etc. If you needed more lines, you had to "attach another sheet". 3. Then you printed that, 4. signed it, 5. scanned it, and 6.…

Reminds me of the time I had to fill out an expense report to get reimbursed by a company who had flown me out for an interview. It all had to be done in Excel. Unfortunately my bank account number was very long, which caused Excel to round down the last two digits. My reimbursement went into someone else’s account who then flagged it to the bank before we got it all straightened out.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#147

Post by forgingahead »

I unfortunately still end up working with contractors who produce code with similar thoughtlessness. Yes, a company like SAP should have caught it via the myriad of reviews and approvals, but ultimately if even in my small universe, this kind of issue can occur because some people just don't care to do a proper job, then it can certainly occur at a larger scale company despite many more layers or "process" to prevent this.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#148

Post by Xt-6 »

asyncscrum wrote: post #91

My favorite fight search tool was hipmunk. Their 'agony' sort was my favorite feature in any software ever. SAP bought them, and I was so hopeful that Concur would bake this into their god awful app that I had to use for work. No luck. RIP Hipmunk.

I used to work at Hipmunk, stayed until it got shot down. SAP Concur approached us to use our auto-completion algorithm/database to power their new UI or whatever. Apparently the 2 or 3 different DB they already had for that exact use case were not good enough. Our result were sorted by population size of the destination, The concur people could not believe it was that only that.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#149

Post by userbinator »

azalemeth wrote: post #116
cookiengineer wrote: post #71

We actually joke around the area where SAP is located (Walldorf, Germany). In surrounding cities devs joke about the fact that there are literally dozens if not hundreds of web agencies doing nothing more than mobile/tablet ready SAP user interfaces. That's their only business model. I'm not kidding you, there's an entire ecosystem around the fact that SAP UI5 is so crap that people cannot use it on their smartphones…

I can't use SAP on my phone because it's rooted and they block that. I have literally no idea why. I'm not going to commit fraud, and if I was going to, having a phone I control would not help matters in the slightest compared to receipts or (more likely) a partner who gives me a kickback under the radar -- like booking.com does for people who say they travel for business, for example.

It's a cat-and-mouse game. Once you actually are root, there's always ways to force apps to behave as you want.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#150

Post by pwh »

Enterprise app is designed typically for CFO's who approve the purchase but never use them. I used to be enterprise app PM. Not the most pleasant experience. They didn't care about UI/UX. We created vanilla version of the app and the team ended up working mostly with consultant (professional services) who interacted directly with end users and they were paid a lot for customizing the app.
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