How do you manage vendor dropdown list?

[JackFan]

Hi, 

I am the concur admin for our company and I wonder how other concur admins manage their vendor dropdown list. For example, the hotel list. Quite often, employee can't find the hotel name in the dropdown list and they will enter the name manually instead. Manual entries will have typo and many names for the same hotel. So what is the best practice in your opinion? Should we create an dropdown option called "Other Hotel" to cover that scenario? Should we make a generic name for hotel chains, like Marriott hotel? Should we create a custom field to capture the "other hotel" and build an audit rule to require employee to enter the name of the "other" hotel so that we can get some statistic data and update the list periodically? What are your thoughts? 

[Munari_alEXPert]

dear @JackFan 

if you had a credit card feed, the hotel name will be automatically captured, without the need to select it from a list or typing manually. That would be the first thing I would look into it, implement a credit card within the organization. If you have instead already the card implemented, reach out to Concur support to verify that the link between the Credit card and the Custom Concur field are the sames about Hotel names.

I wouldn't consider the road of "Other hotels". If you are also using a Travel agency for booking hotels, they should be able to provide you the exact list of hotels in order for you (or the company) to be able to negotiate rates with hotels which might be worth to considered as preferred.  Let us know. Thank you.

[JackFan]

Hi Alessandro,

We do have credit card feed. My concern about getting the list from TMC is that the list will be too long and might have too many choices when it comes to those big hotel chains. But thank you for your input!! 

Jack 

[KevinD]

@JackFan is the Vendor field not being auto-populated when users add the company card transaction to their report? That's what should be happening and I believe what @Munari_alEXPert was referring to. 

[kellgodzisz]

Hi all,

I have a related question - when expenses/receipts are uploaded into Concur, it populates the Merchant name (ex: Starbucks Store #1234). Is there a way to identify the Merchant name by parent level (ex: Starbucks). We would rather have all parent level, “Starbucks”, expenses show up under one Supplier name, instead of individual lines for reporting purposes.

Any insight you can provide would be great. Thank you!

[KevinD]

@kellgodzisz I believe SAP Concur would need to do this for you. I was doing a little research and I found that the Merchant Name can be mapped to either merchant_name or Doing_Business_As in the database. It might be that you need to get Merchant Name mapped to Doing_Business_As. Either way, SAP Concur would need to look into this. You would need to submit a Support ticket.