Business Purpose - Character Limitation

[marlegal]

Any other insurance defense law firms out there? Our clients demand a full and complete description of the reason behind any expense which shows on their bill. Concur's 64 character limitation in the Business Purpose field is causing major problems for us. Management at Concur is working to find us a solution, but suggested I might check out this site to see if others have put anything in place which solves the problem. As it stands right now, users are ignoring the 64-character warning and filling the box with whatever they want. That description is being truncated when it hits the extract, so the invoice generated by our time/billing system shows that incomplete description. Audit companies are rejecting the expense because the description is incomplete, requiring us to appeal based on the backup provided, resulting in payment delays or outright cuts. Concur has suggested that we use a report (yet to be built) instead of the SAE daily extract and put that report into our time/billing software. Has anyone come across this problem and used that solution? Or any solution? Thank you in advance.

[AshleyB]

Hi @marlegal

This is an interesting question. I am curious if others have had this experience as well. I look forward to hearing from your fellow community members.

You could also try asking our User Admin Group if you are your company's Admin. Our User Admin Group members have access to the peer-to-peer knowledge sharing of the group which might provide more insights on this topic. 

 Hope this helps!

[marlegal]

Thank you Ashley. How do I ask the User Admin Group? 

[AshleyB]

Hi @marlegal

The first step would be to join the group. Once your request has been accepted you will start a discussion in the group. It will be the blue button at the top of the group's page. From there it is the same process as you have done here with the major difference being that the post will only be shared with the admins in the group. (all 600 of them!) 

Feel free to reach out if you have any additional questions! I am happy to help.  

[aschwabenbauer]

I work in an insurance defense firm as well and am experiencing the same exact issue.  If you have found a solution outside of changing the export of data, please let me know.  Our data feeds to Prolaw beginning April 1st so I would love to address this before the rollout.

[jfrost]

Hi, we did a couple of things and these ideas may or may not help you.  We added a field to the header called Business Purpose Category.  This is a drop down of commonly used purposes for an expense report like "conference", "research", "development", etc.  That way users can use the business purpose details to put specific info related to that category.  That has helped a lot.  It's helped users fill out both of the fields more accurately and has helped with approvals and audit. 

We also have a custom field on each line called "department reference number" and that field is generic so that each department can populate with codes, numbers, descriptions, etc. that help reference the particular expense line back to their own tracking systems in their department.  

What's nice is that these custom fields are on the SAE and then can be loaded into our ERP and are available any backend reconciliation and audit.

Hope this helps!