By Anya Schiffrin

For anyone who travels for Columbia University-related work or projects, it’s been a post-travel ritual for 20 years. Saving receipts, taping them to an 8 ½ x 11 inch piece of paper and filling out the Travel Business and Expense form commonly known as the TBER. Submitting both and waiting weeks—or even months—to be reimbursed. Now those days are over as Columbia University in 2020 introduced a new reimbursement platform called Concur.  

Because of Covid-19 and restrictions on gathering in groups, we can’t have a proper send-off for the TBER but we don’t want its passing to go unremarked. The end of the TBER is the end of an era. Some 90,000 TBERs were processed annually and complaining about the TBER was an  integral part of SIPA culture. As a former journalist, I have plenty of experience filling out expense forms but many others found it hard to take.

In short, the TBER’s demise was inevitable and so the replacement process began in 2018. Three of the administrators involved kindly gave an interview to The  Morning Post in which they described some of their thinking about travel reimbursement software.

 “We conducted a software selection, looked at the products that were out there and what our peers are doing. Concur is being used by the majority of our peers—Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, U Penn and MIT, ” said  Paul Reedy, Columbia’s Assistant Vice President of Finance Service Management

He added by email that “Our overarching objective is to improve the overall experience for the traveler, administrator and approver…design and configuration decisions….were made in consultation with advisory committees that included faculty and administrators.”

What is the cost of Concur? I asked but Columbia University is a private institution and doesn’t reveal what it pays for individual line items.  As well, the University sometimes signs confidentiality agreements with vendors.

 Ideally using Concur, which was bought by SAP for $8.3 billion in 2014,  will dramatically speed up  the time it takes to reimburse travel costs. Concur is configured with our audit rules so as fields get filled in, at the beginning of the process, mistakes or inconsistencies can get screened out. By the time the reimbursement request reaches accounts payable it can be paid out very quickly, assuming departmental approval  has  been granted.

Another advantage to Concur is that travel can be booked through the travel agent World Travel Inc. (WTI) which also  uses the system. That means there will no longer be any need for out of pocket spending on plane tickets. Fox  Travel, which has been SIPA’s travel agent for years, is not in the system and so will  lose a  lot of business but Moraski, Reedy and  Sheeran said Fox can be used for out-of-pocket travel bookings.

“Columbia will save money because Concur searches the web and our University contracts for the best deals related to all types of travel,” said Ron Moraski, Vice President of Procurement  at Columbia University. 

This is Columbia so, of course, Concur is not actually replacing anything. Rather it’s being integrated with ARC which was introduced in 2012 to the fury of administrators who hated having to enter lengthy chart strings. ARC, however will no longer be used for travel reimbursements as these will now be completed in Concur. To be clear: ARC is an Oracle product and Concur is SAP. They work together but they are different systems and ARC is no longer being used for travel and expense reimbursements.

I asked Reedy, Moraski and Sheeran why Columbia can’t just have a couple of systems that do more and why we need to log into so many different systems to get our work done (I counted about 15 the last time I thought about this). Their emailed  answer epitomized how  tangled and  complicated the world of education software is.

“Although large software companies are producing enterprise software that integrates operations and functions across an organization, there is still a need for specific solutions which may bring a level of focus that can be missing from enterprise software solutions.  As a result, Columbia and other large, complex institutions, need multiple software applications to run our business.“       

Turns out that having multiple software programs is a well-known problem in education. Universities around the world are crushed under the weight of multiple platforms, each of which does just one  thing.  But complaining about higher education software is for another  day.

For now,  let’s  remember our old friend the TBER: gone but not  forgotten. 

Anya Schiffrin is the Director of SIPA’s Technology, Media and Communications Specialization