Software horror show: SAP Concur • Hacker News Board

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#181

Post by fetzu » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 1:11 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #92

fetzu wrote: post #85

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...

You might be right!

This would be hilarious but totally in line with the rest of the tool. Takeaway would be to do the expense reporting when the conversion rates are advantageous!

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#182

Post by GuB-42 » Wed, Jan 11, 2023, 10:03 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #12

The most fundamental theorem of Enterprise software is that the users aren’t the the customer, and so UX issues fall to the very bottom of the priority list. So the explanation is very plausible. Furthermore, amongst the already-low-priority UX issues, I can imagine UX of the expenses application being rock bottom, because which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staf…

This is something I never understood about enterprise software. No one should understand better than companies with employees that time is money. If your employees spend an extra hour each month dealing with bad software, that's an hour of unproductive time you are paying for. Even if your employees tend to work unpaid overtime (boooo), that's still an hour of unpaid overtime that could have been used to do actual work.

And employees are definitely going to spend the time necessary to claim expenses. They may skimp on other tasks, but expenses are money, so they are definitely not going to miss that one.

Big companies love metrics and spying on you, and the time spend on corporate apps is an easy thing to measure. So if you see that your employees spend countless hours on ERP, it should rise tons of red flags.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#183

Post by bobwernstein1 » Wed, Jan 11, 2023, 10:57 PM UTC

tw98521358 wrote: post #180

bobwernstein1 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a whole Concur team of like 5 people at least. All fte's. Employees still have to declare their own expenses. Almost 30k employees. So your suggestion of having just 1 person handling all declarations won't work unless you are suggesting 5 fte's for just Concur isn't enough.

For 30k not enough. Usually an office admin person can process that kind of stuff as part time responsibility. And you have one for every 50-100 employees. So that would be 300-600 PTE users for 30k

Yeah that will never happen. Overhead is already a few percentage points above the industry average. Self service is the industry trend as I see it in this business. Whatever vendor facilitates that will win our business.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#184

Post by HyperSane » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 5:15 AM UTC

slim wrote: post #169

HyperSane wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Syteline would take HOURS to run a report that generated estimates on how much material needed to be ordered for the next month. Year end reconciliation would take over 12 hours. It was just absurdly slow.

"generated estimates on how much material needed to be ordered for the next month" depending on how they doing it could be aching to training AI. IMHO this process taking hours is normal

Nah, it is just basic math based on the quantity and type of product that is ordered.