This is a stressful time of year for lots of businesses, as the gathering up of receipts takes place to fend off the advances of the taxman. But Concur is out to make things a little simpler by helping to keep all that information in one place with the Concur mobile app.
A companion release to the full Concur platform, Concur is designed to work with both iPhone and iPad. It’s been specifically optimized for iPhone 5, and will even work with the iPod Touch, according to reports, as long as the iOS device you’re using is packing iOS 5.1 or better.
Concur offers an easy way to track expenses, allowing a full range of possibilities like photographing receipts, importing data directly from credit cards, itemizing hotel charges, and keeping track of receipts in general via Concur’s Receipt Store. But it goes well beyond that, serving as a way to maximize the overall value of travel, including allowing for the approval of travel requests, and the ability to add events to a schedule as well as meeting attendees. Users can even use the Concur systems to book hotels and flight information, as well as check flight status and get other advantages with a connection to TripIt and TripIt Pro.
“Extreme user-friendliness” seems to be the order of the day with Concur. For a small business that does a lot of traveling, something like this is an excellent approach. Everything is nicely laid out, and the sheer number of functions that come available with Concur allow it to take care of just about every travel-related function that could be encountered. It’s just too good to pass up.
Of course, there are those out there who have decided to try passing up the whole business travel concept by using cloud-based telephony in its place. That’s not as hard as you may think, especially meet-me conferences, which work great for larger group meetings, and instant conferencing, which does very nicely for smaller meetings. Getting conferencing systems that can handle the ability to get people together face-to-face without the need for expensive travel does a fine job of removing major expenses like airfare and hotel stays, not to mention employee per diem, from the ledger.
Not every business can completely remove business travel from the toolbox. For those that can, there’s cloud-based telephony. And for those that can’t, there’s Concur, a system that looks to do an excellent job of keeping all those various travel variables under control
Related keywords: business travel, tax deduction, cloud-based telephony, telepresence