Let’s talk about Concur. If you work in a corporate environment, you’ve probably used it for expense reporting or invoice management. Be honest: do you love it? If you can honestly convince me that you do, I’ll Venmo you $5. (Make your case in the comments)
For most of us, its just an occasional inconvenience. Not for your Finance and Accounts Payable teams. They’re downloading hundreds of invoices and receipts every week, painstakingly clicking through each page one by one because the Concur app doesn’t offer bulk download functionality.
Sit with that for a moment. We’ve got AI generating motion pictures, cars driving themselves, but you can’t download more than one invoice at a time in Concur. It’s not a difficult task, it’s just soul-crushingly repetitive. It’s the kind of task that makes you question whether you’re truly living the human experience to its fullest.
Its the kind of task that is perfect for automation: high volume, low complexity. It may only save a minute per invoice; but it runs hundreds, sometimes thousands of times per week. That’s hundreds of hours per month the team can use to focus on more meaningful work.
But not only that: by automating tasks like this, you’re not just saving time, you’re removing a barrier to innovation. Barriers like this discourage your team from doing things they may want to try but find too tedious to start. When you remove those barriers, you give your team the freedom to think bigger and get creative.
I talk about these kinds of processes in this fun little video: Automation 101: Savings and ROI. These types of automations are my favorite because they’re simple, high-impact, and often doable in just a week. Once you start knocking down these long-standing pain points, your team will wonder how they ever put up with them in the first place.
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How’s it done? Concur has an API. APIs are what machines use to communicate with one another. Whenever I’m assessing the feasibility of automating a process, the first thing I look for is whether the system has an API. With an API, you can often extend a system’s capabilities beyond its default functionality. Instead of adapting your business to fit the limitations of the apps you’ve purchased, APIs let you adapt the apps to fit your business.
Concur is just one example. If you have any apps at your organization where you’re forced to do things one-by-one, you may be sitting on a valuable automation opportunity – one that could pay for itself in a matter of weeks. These tedious tasks might feel like “just part of the job,” but they don’t have to be. With the right approach, you can rid yourself of this time-consuming work, enable your teams to innovate, and reclaim a bit of job satisfaction.
I’d be happy to show you how. You know where to find me.
