Seeking insight from other Travel Authorization Number users

[JulieC]

I'm new to the Concur Community, but not new to managing our corporate travel policies and approvals. We are a large non-profit medical association and we utilize Concur Expenses and Concur Travel for staff only (over 500).  We have not integrated in our Members (over 54,000), nor do we plan to. When Staff or Members travel on behalf of the organization for business, we cover the cost of their airfare.  Prior to any travel booking, trip request must be approved and assigned a travel authorization number (TA #).  Our TA # is more than a standard Program/Project number as it consists of a combination of valued numbers important to our accounting team as well as to our corporate travel company for billing purposes (i.e., 1 Letter + 4 digit project code - 4 digit cost center - 6 digit activity code).  Our TA request process is a multi stepped manual process (complete TA request form, submit form for review/approval, accounting assigns TA #, records TA #, add to original request form, send from back to requesting staff member with a copy to our corporate travel company to code tickets for our tracking and billing purposes).  Additionally, we have no automated verification that authenticates that the provided TA # in Concur Travel or provided to our corporate travel company is the correct approved TA # assigned to said trip.  This results in many miscodings  that require hours of research on the back for our accounting team to identify and properly recode.  In the millennium of technology and automation, we are liteyears behind!  Does anyone have a recommendation of an automated system/platform for better efficiency.  Sincerely, Drowning in too many steps               

[JessicaL]

If you are open to adding Concur Request to your current system, that could help the manual approval process. You would put the travel requests through Concur Request, and once approved, the person could then book through Concur Travel, and then put the expenses through Concur Expense. It all connects to each other, and all the history (approvals/rejections/changes) would be visible in one place. Concur has many options to add custom fields as well, but that might be more difficult and would not solve the manual processing of pre-approvals.

[JulieC]

Thank you Jessica for this suggestion.  We are exploring more about Concur Request to see if this a viable option for our unique needs and/or if its something we can adopt our current ways into.  I know there is a better solution exists than our out dated manual process. JulieC.