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Lessons Learned from Interviews
Notes Lessons learned from interviewing a the business consultant (Traveler persona):
Things already done well for expense reporting:
- Company has their own homegrown system for business expenses
- Air, hotel, car rental was automatically input from company AMEX
Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:
- "Meals were the worst", "we end up 'estimating' " (anything under a certain amount - depending on city - does not require receipts)
- Gas/mileage is done by the mile.
Notes from interviewing business administrator:
Notes from a Lessons learned from VP of Sales :
BEFORE CONCUR
- Fill in expense report excel document template
- They hand sign it
- Manager hands sign it. Some managers would look at the excel document for like a big ticket item ($100 or more) do a quick audit.
- You print out excel document. Staple receipts onto blank paper, google map for mileage. Staple it all together.
- You turn it in to finance department. They would go though excel document and submitted receipts and they'd final check it.
- So every Friday they'd cut a check (if submitted by noon on Thursday)
AFTER CONCUR
(Approver Persona):
Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:
- Manager hands sign approvals. Need a quick way to make sure that no line items are completely inaccurate
- People end up submitting all reports at the same time, and the system gets crowded all at once, therefore need a solution that can handle high volume and allow the person receiving the high volume to be able to deal with all the expenses
Lessons learned from auditor (Auditor Persona):
Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:
- Very manual process of comparing line items to ensure correctness
- Sending back when people make mistakes is very time consuming
- End up having to work with multiple systems at once
- Log into concur (website). Difference between corporate card expenses, personal card expenses. For both, use blackberry to take picture of receipt, email to concur address. Receipt matched up with expense automatically. Personal card they would enter information on receipt on website.
- Effect: use corporate card way more than you used to because its easier.
- Actual process for personal card: give receipts to somebody (secretary) to do that. Corporate card only for executives. Do a batch process.
- Sales people use personal card, manual entry on website.