By Emily Muller

In Dec. 2020, The Morningside Post (TMP) covered the end of the Travel Business and Expense Report (TBER), which required staff and students to paste their receipts on pieces of paper before submitting them. Hopes were high as Concur, the new expense management platform, hails itself as “an end to tedious tasks.”

But many staff members and students say the adjustment has been difficult. Two years after Concur was adopted, several School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) faculty interviewed by TMP said they have stopped submitting work-related expenses to the platform.

TMP advisor Anya Schiffrin, who regularly cooks dinner for students, reports having a receipt rejected because groceries arrived the day before her students were coming for dinner.

“After multiple emails, I was told it was an IRS regulation, but I don’t know what to do. I can’t always cook the day my students are coming over. I’ve more or less given up asking for reimbursements. No point in spending hours responding to alerts because I spent $50 taking a couple of students out to lunch,” Schiffrin said.

Over email, one SIPA adjunct wrote: “I teach only two times per year and take my students to a restaurant two times as well. While I absolutely applaud the intent behind [the updated reimbursement process], the time spent trying to get reimbursed on Concur has been anything but praiseworthy. In fact, online reimbursement was actually easier years ago. Now, it's much more byzantine.”

For adjunct faculty, creating a profile on Concur and inputting the names of dozens of students attending a dinner can be time-consuming. “If you add up all the time spent trying to navigate the system, it literally takes longer than the time I spent with my students at the restaurant itself – sometimes a lot more,” the adjunct said. “Concur is anything but user-friendly for those not using it often.”

As a solution to these system challenges, many staff members report taking students to restaurants nearby that can bill SIPA directly. However, this burdens administrators, including student administrators, to process payments. “Concur is not at all intuitive,” one student hired to help with processing said.

Administrators say the lack of clear information has complicated the process. “It's not a software issue, it's a training gap and diffusion of information issue,” said one administrator.

Another SIPA administrator continues to run individual training sessions for confused faculty. “I think people have this fear [of Concur], but once I walk them through it they see it’s not that complicated,” she said. As administrators become more familiar with the software – and the rules that come with it – fewer reimbursement requests appear to be rejected.

Despite these complaints, the Columbia University Office of Procurement Services, which was responsible for buying Concur, says that the implementation of Concur has exceeded their expectations.

“We launched [Concur] in the height of the pandemic, with a travel and expense tool that no one was traveling with. We had some challenges at the onset. However, we immediately recognized that people were able to do expense submissions quicker, more accurately and more efficiently,” said Ron Moraski, Vice President of Procurement Services.

Paul Reedy, Assistant Vice President, noted that reimbursement requests continue to be filed at a high rate. “As of the end of December [2022], we cleared over 6,429 expense reports,” Reedy said, 114% of the monthly TBER average.

When asked for a breakdown of reimbursement requests and bounces by department, the procurement department noted that they do not collect school-specific data.

Whether Concur is another tedious task or an end to them has yet to be decided, but reviews from the SIPA community appear mixed.

Emily Muller (MIA ‘24) is the Editor in Chief of The Morningside Post.