Concur Small Business Aims for Zero Keystrokes in Travel Expense Reports


Concur has given a new name and new features to its travel expense management reporting software. Formerly called Concur Breeze, the online software application is now Concur Small Business edition.

What I found interesting is the company’s philosophy for the product.  They’ve taken a set of activities – – reporting on travel expenses — and want to make those activities as fast and easy as possible by reducing keystrokes and duplicate data entry. According to Thomas Marks, Director of Small Business for Concur, the company is driving toward zero keystrokes for small businesses.  “Time equals money in small businesses,” he says.

Concur wants to help save time for business owners and company employees who travel on business, by automatically capturing expense and travel data that already exists in other places, such as receipts and credit card statements, and pulling it into Concur’s expense management application.   In other words, instead of your employees rekeying the same data into different applications, the technology does the heavy lifting to capture and move data.

The product lets you:

  • Capture expense receipts with a smartphone
  • Upload or email receipts
  • Sync credit card charges automatically
  • File or submit expenses using a mobile device and Concur’s mobile app

Concur also owns TripIt. If you use TripIt for travel itineraries, the Concur software will extract expense information automatically out of the itinerary and sync it up with credit card statements, so that you don’t have to do all that grunt work.  Then, when the expense report is ready, it automatically syncs data with QuickBooks (desktop edition), so that your accounting records are immediately updated.

Concur Small Business

Concur Small Business has been redesigned to be more intuitive to use in this latest update, with a streamlined dashboard and “smart tips” providing onscreen guidance.  That’s important, because today software has to be “learnable” on your own, without sending people through time-consuming training.

According to Marks, the core market for this product is businesses with 50 employees and under, although larger companies can use Concur Small Business, as can solo entrepreneurs.  It is available for companies located in the United States and the U.K.

Concur was founded about 20 years ago as QuickExpense. Twelve years ago the company began migrating to a cloud based platform, and now all their apps are completely in the form of Web-based or mobile applications.  Concur acquired TripIt in late January 2011.  Concur serves the enterprise market as well as the small business market, with 18 million end users in 100 countries around the world.

4 Comments ▼

Anita Campbell Anita Campbell is the Founder, CEO and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses.

4 Reactions
  1. Fabulous use of technology to make things easier for SMBs. We should get these guys working on the tax code 😉

  2. Ha ha ha, Robert, I love it! Yes, the tax code. 🙂

    Seriously, don’t you just love how they take a narrow activity and squeeze out all the grunt work? Just imagine if we could do that with everything in our businesses.

    – Anita

  3. WOW. This is amazing. I hope it’s as good as it seems.