Universal vs. Professional

[pgoodingEXI]

Hi!   I'm hoping someone can help, we are pretty frustrated.

We were told in a support ticket we needed a sandbox, so we reached out to sales and told we needed to move to Professional to do that.  We were then told by sales the sandbox was a 1 time $2k charge, wouldn't ever have any other payments.  Until we got an invoice for the sandbox that was $2k recurring monthly charge.  (For reference our total user bill is about $1200 so that makes no sense). 

We declined the Sandbox but wanted to move to Professional. 

We were told that moving to professional would give us as admins more freedom and customization that there was NO charge to move, no change in monthly rates.  We specifically showed screens of what we wanted updated and they said yes that could be done we would just need to do it.  We were told that it would take a long weekend, and it was just a ticket in the system to move us over.  We were good with that.   We just heard if we moved we can't move back.  Ok, we're good with that.  

Now, I just got off a call with what we thought would be a "move to professional" discussion and it isn't something we can customize. We have less access to change things, we have to use tickets, AND we have to meet with a consultant who will charge us an hourly rate to move us.  Further, we didn't see professional on the call and won't see an example of professional until perhaps this meeting.  So we they are putting in a ticket to move us, but we have no idea of the fee, or what the end result will look like.  We just know once done it can't go back.   What is happening...

I am a previous SalesForce/Current Hubspot Admin and my counterpart is a Netsuite & Celigo Admin, so we are very familiar with what can break and understanding of implementation and admin profiles. 

My community questions are...

1) Is anyone else having as frustrating of an experience with their sales/support as we are?

2) Were you charged to move to professional?  Were you charged for a sandbox?

3) If you've made the move, how do you feel on the other side?  We have had terrible success with Support Tickets, so the idea of having to use that all the time is concerning.  Can you customize things in your Professional experience?  

Thanks in advance,

-Frustrated Concur Admin

[KevinD]

@pgoodingEXI I will reply as best I can here based on not having any idea of the conversations you had. I do want you to know I did speak with your SAP Concur CSP who informed me that she met with you today. Sounds like your call with Sales was a separate call that didn't include your CSP. I might recommend working with your CSP about fees and such going forward. I was under the impression that migrating is a one-time fee and that is what your CSP said as well. As for the Sandbox,  I was told it is a one year contract that can be renewed each year or canceled at the end of the year.

As for your customization question. When you move to Professional you have a lot more customizing you can do, however what I don't think was communicated to you is a lot of the customizing must be submitted to SAP Concur because you won't have someone at your company with the proper site permissions to make these customizations. However, we do offer an Advanced Configuration class (it does have a cost) that once taken, would give that person full site access to make all customizations you need. I think this was left out of the conversation. This person can then do your customizations without any need to contact Concur Support.

Looks like your CSP is moving forward scoping out your migration, so I would suggest working directly with the CSP and maybe let her deal with Sales to ensure there is no miscommunication.