Help! Ghost Card reconciliation in Concur

[MLDavid]

Hello!

We are looking into creating a ghost card for recurring charges within our IT and Facilities departments.  Does anyone have any experience they are willing to share with any problems/pitfalls with this scenario?  We are thinking of creating a PA id to tie the card for these charges in order for it to feed to Concur and then for recon and approval.

Thoughts?

Thanks.
MD

[Jeremy]

Hi MD,

The first thing to consider is how many charges are you looking at per month for the ghost card program.  The person that is assigned the card in Concur will have to reconcile and code each charge so as long as the number of charges per month is manageable, it should not be an issue.  At my prior company we had several ghost cards that were used for various types of purchases but only one was loaded into Concur.  The others had hundreds of charges per month and it was just easier to process through AP with an excel spreadsheet.

[Zemcik24]

I too would like to know if anyone has experience importing ghost card transactions to Concur. Specifically around airfare. We have a ghost card for all our air transactions (which are several thousand a month). Because of this, the airfare does not going into concur and thus is not in the Cognos reporting tool.

Has anyone imported a ghost card for airfare? If so how did you do it. Assigning to one singular back office employee to reconcile the transactions would not be an option.

[schernau]

We are in the process of implementing Concur, and I was under the impression that if our TMC can pass the passenger name to the bank file, then Concur would be able to match that passenger name field to an employee's profile. Is this not true? It also would not be feasible for our back office to manually match every transaction.

[Ashleyn29]

The company I work for is in the same situation, where we use a ghost card to book all our flights but the ghost card is only mapped to 1 person and they are mannually attaching all the invoices, its a massive issue and we are looking for help resolving this issue 

[EMILLER25]

Hi there...which travel program are you under. We're with AMEX and have a feed that goes into Concur for report reconcilation. Is that what you're looking for  ? 

[MLDavid]

Hi,

I do agree that an excel upload into the AP system would be faster and cleaner.  In our case, we want the employee to be able to change the cost center and add a project code if needed and have their manager approve the air transaction as well since we don't have pre-trip approvals.

[AmberLee]

We're in the same boat here but I haven't found an answer in this forum or Concur yet. Add to that, they told me today they're adding hotel and car rental soon so it will be even more transactions. Sure, we can load them directly into our ERP, but then we lose the visiblity in Concur and we can't allocate to projects. 

[KYates]

the other option is to set up a virtual card program for each payment. 

[KYates]

We do have our ghost cards on the global credit card feed and require one person to manage the expense report and reconcilliation in Concur Expense.  We have a monthly process and the statement amount must match the expense report.  all receipts are attached and reviewed for all charges.

[EMILLER25]

Hi there 🙂  Hoping to get some insight. We are currently under the same program where we have multiple accounts and load all of our travel into Concur for reconciliations. The problem arises when people do not reconcile on time. We've accrued over 1M in unreconciled charges. Do you run into this issue ?  How can I manage this better or have a better automated way of doing it without relying on employees as much. Would love to discuss further if you have the time. 

Thank you 🙂 

[Munari_alEXPert]

Dear David,

it seems that conversation still going on. What was decided at the end, how did you find the approach you have choosen?

It is a very interesting topic and would like to keep it open.

Personally we used Ghost card ONLY for specific individual transactions for booking hotels room, based on 7 years ago experience. here I found more information, however still very limited 

https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/help/en-us/release/expemp_professional/c42acff551...

Based on your question, I would guess/hope, that would be better to issue for each PA or for a person that manage the charge of each department an individual card which than can be charged to the specific project or be allocated to a different cost center. 

Did you also try to reach out directly your Concur administrator, and if you are that person, to contact them for further information on how to best handle your type of requests?