Ghost Card Charges Flowing to Concur Expense?

[PamSciarra]

We are in the process of implementing Concur Travel and have used Concur Expense for many years.  We have several corporate card feeds set up.  We are exploring the option of allowing users without corporate cards to book their travel and utilize a ghost card.  However, I wanted to find out if this would allow for reporting and approvals in Concur Expense (not the approvals in Travel.)

1.  Can the ghost card charges flow into the traveler's expense page to be reported (similar to a corporate card charge)?  Does the ghost card charges know which user's expense queue to flow into?

2.  Do the ghost card charges appear on the Expense Intelligence accrual reports for those employees who have not reported their ghost card charges yet through expense.

Appreciate any feedback I can get on this!

[KevinD]

Pam,

I can answer part of your question.

1.  Can the ghost card charges flow into the traveler's expense page to be reported (similar to a corporate card charge)?  Does the ghost card charges know which user's expense queue to flow into? Yes. SAP Concur Card Services can help you get this setup correctly. The other term you may hear is a Lodge Account. Anyway, the credit card feed uses the Employee ID to know whose account to upload into. The user submits the expense like any other, but the payment type will default to Company Paid. As far as those charges appearing in Cognos Intelligence on the report you mentioned, that I don't know.

I hope this helps,

Kevin

[sasrsc]

Obviously you have experience with the cc feeds coming into Expense but those reading your posts they should be aware that not all credit cards are created equal and not all flow into Concur at all or as seamlessly as advertised. BTA/Lodge Cards/CTA (whatever you want to call it) also are different to normal individual cards, so again be warned. Just because the individual card feeds into Concur doesn't mean the CTA/BTA/Lodge card version will! 

[Romeeta]

Yes that is a good point - we are trying to automate the BTA/Lodge/Ghost Card account directly into Concur Expense, but have had our challenges. It's different from individual Corporate Credit Card feed. I feel the corporate credit card feed pulls more information into Concur Expense than the BTA/Lodge/Ghost Card account feed and there isn't has much flexibility to improve the information flowing through. 

[MLDavid]

Hi,

Wanted to know how this process ended up for you?  Did you go through the Ghost Card for travel?  I'm in the same situation now and would love to hear your outcomes.

Thanks.

Maria

[Romeeta]

Hi there, thanks for reaching out. We are in the test phase right now. We received a file from our travel management company and that file flowed through to Concur Expense. Transtions were based on employee ID. Looks exactly like a credit card transaction except that it is from our ghost card. We hope to go live before the end of the year. Feel free to reach out further. 

[PamSciarra]

Hi,

We decided to do both air & hotel (Conferma) charges.  We are a year into the implementation process.  Admittedly, the hotel piece has complicated and slowed the roll out.

We are currently in our pilot phase.  A heads up - you will need your TMC, corporate card company and Concur all lined up to do this project.  You will also need to have a way for your TMC to send over the employee ID number for the transactions.

I've been somewhat surprised at how long this has taken to put into place (a year and counting.)  So be sure to have a lot of patience with this roll out process.  But like another user said, the transactions do come in looking like corporate card charges.

[CL_Archgroup]

Hello,

I am interested in this process since we are experiencing similar pain points. We are using Lodge/Ghost cards for airfare charges, our TMC provides the itinerary in our Travel module, which then goes to our Expense module for submission and approval. Our pain point is that the TMC itinerary amount does not agree to the final invoice due to airline and credit card fees, which shows in the lodge card statement.

Ideally, we would like to get a feed from the lodge card to Concur expense (similar to the corporate card transactions)

Please let me know if you were successful so we can connect and hopefully I can resolve this issue.

Thank you, 

[PamSciarra]

Hi,

We were successful in getting our ghost card and virtual hotel card program set up so those charges feed into Concur and map to the traveler's expense account in Concur.  Caveats = It took almost 2 years with AMEX (and our TMC) to get set up - so it's not an everyday thing for even big AMEX.  ALSO, you need someone monitoring the charges to identify card feed failures.  It does happen and often enough to get tickets raised with AMEX and resolve with them and the TMC.  So not as seamless as you would expect in this day and age.  BUT definitely a way to provide non-corporate card holding employees a way to charge.

[Romeeta]

Well said Pam. I am glad we have it in place as it does save us (Accounts Payable) some time and puts the responsibility to the expense user. 

[sbrown3513]

@PamSciarra Hi, your post has been very helpful! Our company is considering a Lodge Card for our group travel booking, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this works. When in the booking process does the 'Employee ID' get assigned so that a particular individual will be responsible for clearing that particular group of tickets? Our company is very decentralized with over 30,000 cost centers, so I want to make sure this solution would work for us before putting in 1+ years of work to implement it. Appreciate any advice you could provide.  Thank you!

[PamSciarra]

Hi,  Our Concur Travel interface is configured to capture the employee's user ID# and this is then captured by our TMC and sent in a daily file to our corporate card company (AMEX).  They then marry this data in their card tool and it goes onto the credit card feed into Concur Expense.  In order to accomplish this, we had to have a 3-way project (us, TMC, AMEX) to set up this data flow from our TMC to AMEX to Concur.  (We have Concur Travel through our TMC which is why we didn't also include Concur in this project.)  Just a heads up - this was a 18-24 month project to get this set up AND it requires continual maintenance and monitoring.  When data doesn't come through (whether it's a one-off charge or a failure over multiple days), a staff not only has to be monitoring the "orphaned" charges in Concur Expense to map them but also be ready to manually map them.  So it's not a "set it and forget it" process - it does take labor allocation to manage and monitor it continually.  I recommend you start the conversation with Concur Travel or TMC (depending on how you have Concur Travel) and your corporate card company (who you have your lodge card through) to determine next steps.  Good luck!