Recommendations needed for Travel and Expense Mgmt Software

Our Accounts Payable department is looking into implementing a Travel and Expense Management software to help with managing our employees' expense reports. Looking for recommendations on a product that you love. Also wanted to know if you primarily reimburse expense reports through Accounts Payable or through Payroll. One primary reason that we reimburse through Accounts Payable is the ability to have the reimbursement go to a different bank account than the employee's pay check/direct deposit. If there are ways to accommodate this through Payroll, we would love to hear about it.
Thanks
Jaimee O'Banion

@Marcia Holmes-Rousell Thank you for the information. Concur is one that we are about to look into!

@Kevin McAlexander Thank you for the feedback.

@Ellen Deak Thank you for your feedback.. Good points to consider. Concur is one of the vendors we are looking into.

@SuzAnne Garcia Thank you for your reply!

@Jaimee O'Banion We were using the JDE expense management a few years ago but our users really wanted a mobile platform. The mobile version had just come out and we tried to implement but there were just too many issues with it. We had been using Concur Travel and Transport for many years for creating reservations so ended up moving away from JDE EM and went to Concur for expense report processing as well. We have the reimbursements done through JDE AP.

@Jaimee O'Banion Here at Windstream, we use Infor's Expense Management. When we implemented it 19 years ago it was a best of breed platform and it remains a leader in this space. We looked at Concur at the time, but chose Infor for it's JDEdwards integration. We were on JDE World A7.3 at the time. We are now on JDE E1 9.1 and the integration is different now, as we created our own custom integration. We evaluated Oracle's JDEdward's T&E expense solution 2 years ago and they are still far behind Infor and Concur. The package is not very configurable as the mature solutions. There is really no business rule functionality like you will find in Infor's product. The mobile app was very lacking.

We pay employee expense reimbursements from Accounts Payable.

@Jaimee O'Banion A previous company I worked for used Concur Travel and Expense. We also had company credit cards and procurement cards where the credit card transactions were interfaced into Concur. As an employee entering and submitting expense reports, it was pretty easy to use. For our AP people, I believe it provided them a lot of flexibility to configure different ways to select expense reports for auditing and flagging ones with issues. As an IT person, it was interesting to integrate to JDE. Getting the basic Concur configuration down so that you can get the information you need into the standard interface file they provide is very important during the initial implementation.
One drawback at the time was that they didn't really have a test system. During the initial implementation, you were in a test system where you could make configuration changes and try them out and then your final configuration was moved to production. But after go-live, you don't have that any longer. That company I worked for was doing a multi-country rollout, one country at a time. So, initial rollout gets the US going, but the next rollout is country with VAT tax and you are messing around with the configuration in production. I believe we paid extra for access to some sort of test system, so we could work the configuration out there, but it was a manual effort to then redo the new configuration in production.
There will be pros and cons to any option, I hope this helps.
Ellen Deak

@Jaimee O'Banion Hi Jaimee. JD Edwards has its own Expense Management module and it looks pretty robust from the demos we've seen. We are seriously considering implementing it following our 9.2 E1 upgrade. Currently, we use A/P to process expense reports unless it is more than 60 days past the date of travel, in which case they must go through Payroll. I am unsure about the specific bank account designation for travel reimbursements out of Payroll. It will be interesting to hear others chime in on this...