Any business traveler knows that filling out expense forms can be a major pain. But Redmond-based Concur is hoping to make it a little less burdensome with the introduction today of a new mobile offering that allows users to input mileage, hotel charges and other travel and entertainment expenses on the go. With the launch today, Concur customers will have the ability to update and approve expense forms from a Blackberry or Windows Mobile device. An iPhone offering is in the works for this summer.
"When do you do your expense reports? The weekends and at night," said Chris Juneau, senior director of segment marketing at Concur. "Travelers are already naturally doing things on their mobile devices. They are ... texting, they are making appointments. So why not extend that?"
With the mobile application, Juneau said that travelers can simply take a photo of a receipt with a camera phone and have it integrated with their Concur expense management tool. Travelers also can work offline, so an executive who wanted to input information on the go would be able to do so on a plane returning from a trip.
Security is a potential issue, since people are prone to lose mobile devices. But Juneau said that all of the important personal information resides off the device.
In order to make sure that the experience is seamless and fast, Concur partnered with Boston-based Pyxis Mobile. It seems like a no-brainer to extend the Concur offering to the mobile environment since that's where most people are accumulating corporate expenses. Juneau said that smart phone technology has "evolved enough" to allow a robust application like Concur's.
And he thinks the economic climate is such that corporations want to gain more insight into travel budgets and expenses.
Concur, which has been in the news the past few days because of inaccuracies in the corporate bios of the top two executives, has more than 8,000 clients. It employs more than 900 people.
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