See also: "Lidl’s €500 Million SAP Debacle" https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...
Which shows how complex enterprise use cases can be and how valuable good SAP consultants are. With all its faults, for many large companies it's still much better and cheaper to have all processes on SAP than using dozens or hundreds of specialized (often self developed) applications. At least with SAP you always find someone who will help you, with your 20-year old in-house developed software, no one will want to touch that code again.
Fun fact: last year I had to re-input a whole expense report because of a greyed out mandatory field (I wish I was kidding). So I naturally made screenshots of every position to re-enter them. The amount of the second expense report was not the same as the first (it was less in my local currency): apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?). I emailed o…
> apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?).
Assuming all the dates were set up the same, it could be that the exchange rate are "latest at creation of expense" (or just "latest") and the rates had been updated in the meantime.
I'd usually expect the exchange rate to be the rate at the date the expense was incurred but...
Workers need to stop giving corporation access to their credit card. That is an even simpler solution.
I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead. A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.
Oh ye I forgot kickbacks on CC is a thing in the US.
I even remember a colleague when I worked in California boast to me about his $10000 claim recipe and the kickback.
Since it was a 5 man startup at that point I don't think it was worth the credit risk though.
Ye well ... dunno who to blame then in the CC mess.
I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead. A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.
Oh ye I forgot kickbacks on CC is a thing in the US. I even remember a colleague when I worked in California boast to me about his $10000 claim recipe and the kickback. Since it was a 5 man startup at that point I don't think it was worth the credit risk though. Ye well ... dunno who to blame then in the CC mess.
The blame is now even more clearly on the employees. They get the hassle of expenses because they want the kickbacks.
That is the crux of it. I have a background in finance, and I think everyone is missing the problem that this is trying to solve. People are careless when they claim expenses. They claim for things they lost the receipt for and then they try and pressure some accounts clerk into forcing it through. They make careless mistakes like multiplying their milage by the wrong rate, because they don't see why they should have…
Wouldn't a flat per diem payment make more sense then? That way you don't need the complex (and presumably pricey) expenses software, and you don't torture your employees with it when they could be doing something useful.
In reality you end up dealing with a flat per diem... that you have to calculate to the hour with things like crossing borders (even funnier when you have to include work authorizations in there, like with Switzerland!), and you still have expense claims, which might or might not be discounted by per diem depending on type of the claim!
My particular annoyance is Concur "punishes" you for having the temerity to disable tracking cookies (which is a legal requirement to be the default, and they're based in Germany so there's no excuse). Every time you select this option, which is every time I do an expense, it sits there for many minutes pretending to update my preferences.
I don’t think the law on tracking cookies applies to your work tools on your work computer
Not if the tracking entity would be the company I'm employed to, not some 3rd party tool
Anyway, for non-compliant cookie dialogs, I accept and then remove the cookies manually. Track that.
They might enjoy a complaint to the relevant privacy authorities as well
I don’t understand the disdain here in Hacker News for enterprise software. Every now and then this type of post would show up, decrying how terrible the user interface is or how awful looking the fonts are and how they can program the same functions in 1000 lines of code and support thousands of users. These companies have revenue in the billions. They have enabled large companies, since before many of us were born.…
I think it is a superiority complex. SAP, IBM, Oracle (and many small companies running for ages) are all making "shitty" products, yet, every year, their revenue is in billions. On the other hand, we have "beautifully hand-crafted products with love" made in the best languages human can invent (your favorite language only HN crowd dicking around), and those companies are barely paying their developers and bills. But…
Did you really have to add a jab at vegan food and renewable energy in there and somehow make this about politics?
Where is this weird (and frankly suspicious) hostility against either of those even rationally coming from?
No need to act as if "crazy HN hipster developers" (apparently your perspective) are the only ones who don't understand that there is a very good reason why SAP is still used at Apple and Google.
My personal experience so far is that the whole SAP ecosystem is a great way for incompetent people to print money. I’ve worked for companies that ran SAP and paid obscene amounts of money for SAP consultant and developers to write terrible code using their proprietary language. We had this issue with a certain report that was outputting weird values. Company had to pay the partner for support. I’ve skimmed over the…
I worked for a company that uses Syteline ERP and it was a similar horroshow.
I worked for a company that uses Microsoft Navision.
The consultant/dev wold remote work via Teamviewer directly on the production system. Build in editor had no syntax highlighting. No version control possible, since the code is in the database. (Unless the dev copied the code into Notepad and saved it separately.) Certain reports would block all clients company-wide. To print something one would need to click ~6 buttons with super long mouse movements. I programmed AutoHotkey-Scripts to ease the pain. "Fun" times :-)
Oh ye I forgot kickbacks on CC is a thing in the US. I even remember a colleague when I worked in California boast to me about his $10000 claim recipe and the kickback. Since it was a 5 man startup at that point I don't think it was worth the credit risk though. Ye well ... dunno who to blame then in the CC mess.
The blame is now even more clearly on the employees. They get the hassle of expenses because they want the kickbacks.
You still have to file the expenses even if you use the company card, at least everywhere I’ve worked.
OMG sorry this is so relevant ... we've just been dealing with a client with SAP software that is supposed to automate on-boarding suppliers/customers.
It takes 2 people client side to hand hold third-parties through the labyrynth, and 1 person at the third party to desperately go back and forth to those 2 people to check if everything is ok and to answer questions about why things aren't progressing.
Literal facepalm.
Have had the same experience with two other clients recently. What is going on with SAP?