JHTravel
Occasional Member - Level 3

EU Travel Allowance

We are implementing Concur Expense and Travel in EMEA, North America, and APAC. Our company policy is to reimburse for actual vouched expenses. Our EU team is concerned about a few countries where per diems seem to be the standard. We have configured travel allowances for Germany and Austria, but they are questioning Switzerland, Czech Republic, and Denmark. In the country specific concerns document, Concur states it is not standard to use travel allowances in Switzerland, but they do offer standard templates in Czech and Denmark.  Are there any customers that are using actual expense reimbursements in these countries? If so, have you had any issues doing so?

7 REPLIES 7
leela2516
Super User
Super User

Hello @JHTravel - We have Switzerland and Czech Republic implemented on Concur. For Switzerland, employees get reimbursed for actual expenses, but we do not have Travel Allowance implemented for them. For Czech Republic, we use Fixed rates with a combination of Government and Company rates. Denmark is not implemented on Concur and not currently on our roadmap, but we are being requested to include it. I will be requesting information be provided by the country to assess if we want to try to add them to our roadmap now or wait until after our roadmap is fully implemented. Sorry, this may not be much help for you, but thought it might be useful to know how other companies are handling TA for these countries.

JHTravel
Occasional Member - Level 3

Thank you for your response.  It actually does help with Switzerland.  We would like to reimburse actuals globally, so I am wondering if anyone is doing so in Czech and Denmark.  I appreciate your feedback!!

Hi - I know this post is quite old, but I could not find much on the community pages for CZ travel allowance. We have been trying to implement for the last few months, but continue to face push back based on the meal deduction times. Have you had any issues on that? For example, they are preset (Breakfast = 8 AM) and if a trip starts at 9 AM then breakfast deduction does not calculate. 

@jpotts - Sorry, I totally missed your question. Because we use company rates, we did configure the way we wanted it but as I recollect, we went with the defaults in the system. We also have time bands - so like 0 - 5 hours, there is no allowance regardless of the time.

JHTravel
Occasional Member - Level 3

Sorry for the delay.  I was traveling for business.  We did not face push back in CZ but we continue to have issues with our Austrian teams.  We use custom rates which has caused issues with how the meal deductions are being calculated as well as how the allowances are calculated when an employee does cross-border travel.  As a result, we have not been able to move to the new travel allowance feature.  We have been told that while the standard rate bundle is available for Austria, they are not technically in-scope yet.  Support was not able to sort out the issues we had with managing our custom rates and as our rates are significantly higher than the statutory rates, we are kind of stuck.

Thanks for the feedback! I was able to find how to edit calculation rules for "Meals" in the new travel allowance service. There are a few options such as  "Ignore Deduction Time" for Deductions. So I think we might be able to customize some of these rules and pair with Concur Rate Bundles. Just need the region to test and confirm!

JHTravel
Occasional Member - Level 3

That is great news.  Once you have tested, I would love to discuss the solution you discovered.