Las Vegas - Concur here this week at its annual user conference introduced an
App Center to house partner travel apps and detailed an upcoming expense
reporting tool that automatically populates expense reports by scanning photographed
receipt images.
Concur's App Center is
"a new marketplace for Concur clients and their employees" that is
built on Concur's T&E Cloud, according to the company. Users can link to
suppliers that provide electronic receipts via Concur, and "through Concur
Open Booking users will be able to link their accounts with travel suppliers
like Avis, so reservations made on Avis.com flow automatically into Concur and
TripItPro," according to Concur.
The new Concur App
Center allows web and mobile software developers to list apps that are
integrated with Concur's platform. The list already includes partner apps from
Taxi Magic, GroundLink, visa information provider CIBT, Replicon, Visage
Mobile, ExpenseConnect, TripLingo Business Class and several others.
"The app center
shows you all that innovation that is coming from our partners as they
arrive," said Concur president, COO and co-founder Raj Singh. The apps
made available, he said, include those for businesses to manage their travel
and expense programs, and for travelers to manage their trips. "It is a
place where your travelers can link to suppliers, to enable things like Open Booking,
and to link to third-party mobile applications that deliver interesting
content."
Meanwhile, Concur's new
ExpenseIt tool—currently being tested by Concur employees and expected to be available
to customers by year-end—is an Apple iOS mobile app that uses optical character
recognition technology to automatically import into expense reports information
from photographed receipts. Users can review the prepopulated information and
manually make changes if data was captured inaccurately.
"All I need to do as a traveler is either snap a picture of my
paper receipts as I go throughout my trip, or forward emails if I get an email
receipt, and ExpenseIt is going to do all the magic behind the scenes to
actually understand what's on that receipt and turn it into an expense and put
it on my expense report," said Concur executive vice president of
corporate strategy John Torrey. "When I come back
into Concur, not only have all those receipts turned to expenses, they've all
been put into my open expense report, and I'm basically notified that my
expense report is ready to be submitted now as the last step."
The tool includes features
of other Concur's other expense tools, including the ability to itemize
receipts, including hotel folios.
The optical character
recognition that allows automatic information imports is not a first in the
expense system world. Abukai and others offer similar capabilities.