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Software horror show: SAP Concur

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Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#161

Post by ulfw »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #132
aikinai wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions. For a cross-country trip with a $500 flight, 3 night at a $200 hotel, 4 $25 taxi trips and 9 (average) $20 meals that works out to 1% of $1380 or $13.80. In exchange for this modest benefit you will need to keep receipts and do data entry for about 15 items. If you forget a single meal receipt or accounting disputes a single charge, you’re already in…

My credit card gives 5 miles per USD for flight bookings, between 3 and 5 miles per USD ofr hotel bookings (depending of direct or via an OTA) and 5 miles per USD for restaurant/food purchases. Now one can call a mile worth one cent or one and a half cent, whatever you want. Either way it's going to be closer to a 3-8% personal benefit rather than 1%. If you travel rather often it adds up.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#162

Post by landemva »

rightbyte wrote: post #79
jimnotgym wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Workers need to stop giving corporation access to their credit card. That is an even simpler solution.

> Workers need to stop giving corporation access to their credit card.

I haven't experienced that, though I presume you have.

First full time job I had a biz amex. Last full time job was a biz visa. Both with my name on card and neither were mine personally. I didn't pay the cc bill.

I had to do expense reports and categorize each item.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#163

Post by signatoremo »

jimnotgym wrote: post #18
bigDinosaur wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any mythos around US engineering in the way there is about German practicality, efficiency, and reliability?

There is about software engineering yes, a myth that only the US can build great products

Only in your imagination. Many great products made by none US companies are used in the US and deservedly recognized — Redis, Jetbrains’ ones, Erlang, Lua, Scala, nginx, etc.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#164

Post by oogali »

aikinai wrote: post #82
rightbyte wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The company doesn’t care about the non-monetary perks.

They do care about making sure they reach the volume commitment on the bulk airfare and hotel rooms they have prepaid for in order to receive a large discount.

Prepayment that only works for the airlines and hotels if they’re not simultaneously discounting this large corporate customer’s rates AND paying fringe benefits to the end user.

And since they can’t tell you to not travel, this is generally why large company CFOs have policies in place that mandate these categories of spend are done via their travel agency, which was dominated by Concur prior to the SAP acquisition.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#165

Post by oogali »

hef19898 wrote: post #67
Moissanite wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depending on jurisdiction, taxes. So it is most likely not the company responsible for the "torturing"...

This.

In the US, maximum allowable per diem rates vary by location and are set by the Internal Revenue Service.

https://www.gsa.gov/perdiem

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#166

Post by josephcsible »

jimnotgym wrote: post #25
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…

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…

> They claim for things they lost the receipt for and then they try and pressure some accounts clerk into forcing it through.

If you lose a receipt, or aren't given one at all, for a reimbursable expense, should your employer just tell you that you're out the money for it?

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#167

Post by josephcsible »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #132
aikinai wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions. For a cross-country trip with a $500 flight, 3 night at a $200 hotel, 4 $25 taxi trips and 9 (average) $20 meals that works out to 1% of $1380 or $13.80. In exchange for this modest benefit you will need to keep receipts and do data entry for about 15 items. If you forget a single meal receipt or accounting disputes a single charge, you’re already in…

> Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions.

This is a significant underestimate. Consider that the Citi Double Cash card gives unlimited 2% cash back on everything, and that a lot of other cards offer even higher rates (I've seen 5%) for individual categories.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#169

Post by slim »

HyperSane wrote: post #155
noAnswer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

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

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#170

Post by racked »

irusensei wrote: post #20

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…

> Company had to pay the partner for support. I’ve skimmed over the code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop.

This is not a SAP-specific problem. I've seen highly paid programmers with veteran-like CVs deliver absolute crap in the PHP world. If there's a shortage of good programmers, you'll get this kind of thing. Moreso if it's in a un-sexy field of work like SAP.

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