Software horror show: SAP Concur • Hacker News Board

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#201

Post by roflyear » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 3:47 AM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #58

sokoloff wrote: post #18

I hate submitting expenses probably as much as the typical engineer, but Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems. I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature. I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state , happi…

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.

I just email mine to our comptroller

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#202

Post by bullman » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 8:14 AM UTC

greatgib wrote: post #121

To give my software dev guess of the reason of the issue, I would suggest this: Concur being based on SAP, forms are built in a kind of "no code" way. There is a generic component "list picker from data table". Usually, for that kind of components, the order is user defined based of the row position in the data table or an index column value. Like first "N/A" then "yes" the "no". As it is obviously too complicated to…

Concur is not "based" on SAP. Concur was acquired by SAP in 2014. The majority of it's existing codebase remains in place to this day. Even the newer more modern code base bits are reactJS based, not SAP based.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#203

Post by gorkish » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

tjohns wrote: post #124

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…

It's worth noting that SAP Concur wasn't designed by SAP. They acquired it. It's had some minor UI tweaks since, but for the most part is unchanged from the pre-acquisition product.

If by "minor UI tweaks" you mean "destroyed the platform" then, yes, it has had some work done.

Their most recent announcement is the reintroduction of the ability to drag-and-drop receipts onto expenses. Not in the list view where everyone used to do it, mind you, but maybe someday they will bring that feature back as well. Maybe they will eventually bring back their outlook program that lets you upload an email as a receipt too!

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#204

Post by mustardo » Fri, Dec 09, 2022, 11:05 AM UTC

FrostKiwi wrote: post #119

What gets me the most is this instance of SAP Concur to have timestamps on files of receipts being uploaded. I don't have access to the Concur app, so must use the web interface. That interface rejects smartphone photos from the company iPhone, because of unrecognized timestamps. Scanner or bust. Furthermore electronic receipts PDFs are also rejected for the same reason. So what I do is scan a blank piece of paper, P…

> Never ending warnings you can't turn off and many other small things lead me to skipping small expenses and just eating them, because I can't be bothered to fight Concur.

Sometimes I wonder if this is a "feature not a bug" the company wins and saves money (in the short term)

It probably costs them via reduced employee happiness turnover etc etc indirectly but there is no KPI for that