Expense report hell

[smackaholic]

Spent a few hours last night on my favoritest software program in the universe, SAP.

Apparently, SAP is one of the more common programs out there and seems to be universally hated by all of its users. Try googling "what expense report program sucks shit through a straw" and the odds are pretty good that the first page of results will be filled with SAP references. I doubt it is THE worst expense reporting system out there. That title, without a doubt goes to DTS.

The Defense Travel System, I am fairly certain, was written with the goal of causing the user to throw up his hands and say fuggit, I'll eat the bill. I am sure the DoD has saved countless millions in this way, surely enough to pay for the system. Fortunately, I only need to use it once a year and the DTS wizard at the reserve center can click me through it pretty quickly and get me paid

Getting back to the Suck Ass Program, how many of you fukks are burdened with it? What are your thoughts regarding it? Are there even worse ones? I can't imagine it.

There really are just 3 things about it that make me want to track down its creator and carry out some sort of primitive culture's torture ritual on him and that would be....

The divide expenses over multiple work orders tool. When you open this window, you get a spreadsheet with 6 visible rows. So long as you split it 6 ways or less, its fine. Last night I did a month long report and split it about 30 ways. When you try to scroll down below line 6, the existing lines must total 100%. If it doesn't, it scolds you and tells you you should have paid attention in 1st grade when you learned addition. The work around to this is to continually modify your last entry percentage to meet the 100% rule. Why in the fukk it doesn't allow me to expand the box so I don't have to scroll, is beyond me.

The next fun feature is when you do something it didn't like. When you try to save it, you get an ugly "WTF did you do" noise and angry looking red text. It wouldn't be bad, if you could say, "my bad", back up a step and save, but you can't. You basically have to eject and lose everything since the last save. There has been many a saturday afternoon that I sat here, staring at the screen, realizing that the last half hour of data entry should have been spent doing something more productive like watching pron. Not quite sure how my laptop hasn't taken flight through the nearest window yet. I mean fukk, its a company laptop and I have a lifetime, "no fukking matter how I busted it" window warrantee. So, it's not like I would be out much.

And then there is the last one. My favorite. At the end, after negotiating the SAP minefield and finally having a finished product, if you click the button that gives you a printable final report, don't forget to save it first. It will not ask you to save it. It will happily display it and even fukking print it. So, I guess, in a way, it has "saved" it. But back somewhere on a server, probably in a bathroom next to Hillary's server, it hasn't saved it. And guess fukking what. IT WONT!!! It doesn't matter how many times you click that little floppy disk up at the top, it will just taunt you with that evil, you fukked up, asshole, chime.

I read somewhere that a sure sign of alcoholism is one's tendency to drink alone, kind of like George Thoroughgood used to do before he found Jesus. I don't mean having a beer or two with dinner, I mean drinking with the solitary goal of getting fukked up. I made it 53 years without doing this. A few months ago that changed. I was sitting at my dinning room table, slogging through a few expense reports and after hearing that fukking chime one time to many, I said fuggit and grabbed a nearly full bottle of Kettle One, a few limes, lots of ice and a bottle of tonic. Those expense reports did get done, eventually and I got very comfortably numb. And to top it off, I did a play by play narrative on fb. Not sure if that was a good idea. Oh well.

Well, that's enough SAP ranting for now. What do you a-holes use. I would like to know in particuar what those of you that own a business chose to use. I have a theory on this topic. I am fairly certain that business owners know it is in their interests to make giving out money to their underlings difficult. Make it difficult enough and some will just get drunk and burn their receipts because it is easier.

[Left Seater]

We use expenseit from Concur since it integrates nicely with Tripit which is a travel management tool. Unfortunately SAP bought Concur last year so no idea on what this will do to our pricing early next year.

The great thing about expenseit is you can snap photos using your iPhone or email the receipt to expenseit and it auto adds it and categorizes the expense. Further if the expense matches what was expected then it is automatically approved. For example, our travel booker in the office books my hotel in Denver for tonight. She emails the confirmation to Tripit and it shows up in my app. Then tomorrow I will forward the receipt tomorrow to expenseit and it will compare the rate and taxes paid to the reservation and as long as they match it will submit the expense as approved and will be ready to be paid on Friday.

As a business owner I want my employees to submit their expense reports ASAP. The easier I make it for them the quicker they will submit them and the more likely they are to be accurate and within policy. This then allows me to bill these expense back to my customers or close out a contract. I would never allow an employee to have an expense open for 30 days. Company policy is 10 days, and you will not be paid for any expenses submitted after this point in time without prior written approval.

[The Big Pickle]

I've had hundreds of threads infinitely better than this and they ended up in TROTS.

Seriously....who is going to read all that crap about such a boring topic?

I made it to "Spent a few hours last night..." and then I fell asleep.




ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

[atmdad]

"you should have paid attention in 1st grade when you learned addition."

"you fukked up, asshole"

Cliff Notes version of 'Holic's rant.

[smackaholic]

I've had hundreds of threads infinitely better than this and they ended up in TROTS.

Seriously....who is going to read all that crap about such a boring topic?

I made it to "Spent a few hours last night..." and then I fell asleep.




ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

yeah, we get it. Bar backers at the local holiday inn lounge don't even know what an expense report is. Have a good nap.

[Arch Angel]

SAP? you mean STOP ALL PRODUCTION?

We use that at Rockwell Collins, since I moved on from Cedar Rapids, the company I am at is switching from an antiquated system to a newer brand. It has been brutal since I am the only programmer. Chugging 12 to 14 hours a day is a norm for me.

Want to switch places? SAP is much easier to program (ABAP) than the five I use now as inter-programming languages is a bitch to remark on what does what so they tie into each other under the .Net platform. The biggest issue is updates that would render code useless and you have to hunt for the problem and then rewrite to get it to work correct.

ARGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

[The Big Pickle]

yeah, we get it. Bar backers at the local holiday inn lounge don't even know what an expense report is. Have a good nap.

I'm just trying to help.

You should have started out your story with a catchy opening statement...like this...


The night was sultry.....

And then EVERYONE would have continued to read to find out why the night was sultry.

[smackaholic]

SAP? you mean STOP ALL PRODUCTION?

We use that at Rockwell Collins, since I moved on from Cedar Rapids, the company I am at is switching from an antiquated system to a newer brand. It has been brutal since I am the only programmer. Chugging 12 to 14 hours a day is a norm for me.

Want to switch places? SAP is much easier to program (ABAP) than the five I use now as inter-programming languages is a bitch to remark on what does what so they tie into each other under the .Net platform. The biggest issue is updates that would render code useless and you have to hunt for the problem and then rewrite to get it to work correct.

ARGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

Stop All Production?

I like it.

No, Arch, you are talking way over my head now on the programmer end of things. I am just talking as a poor computer challenged fukk that has to log into this wretched program to try and get my Amex bill paid. A good deal of the problem lays at my companies feet in that they want to split up the charges to countless WOs, 90+% of which are paid by 1 client, the TSA. Actually, they aren't paid individually. We have a maintenance contract with TSA that covers T&M for one flat fee. So, breaking it down beyond, maybe the airport, or possibly equipment model, of which there are two, is first off, a waste of time and second, shitty data anyway. It is a bunch of fair tales.

Unfortunately, management these days have an idea that more data is better. Some fukking times more data is just more and frequently the result is workers just pulling numbers out of their asses. When a significant amount of your work day ends up being spent essentially quantifying what you did, you have a problem. I was recently listening to some radio financial talk show where they discussed this topic. They talked about how managers are obsessed with data collection to the point where it is killing productivity. Saw it at my last job and I see it now, even worse. They sited statistics about how US productivity numbers over the last decade have plateaued and possibly even started dropping, after a few decades of big productivity increases. And they seemed to believe that this very topic is the reason for the slowing of productivity growth.

[smackaholic]

yeah, we get it. Bar backers at the local holiday inn lounge don't even know what an expense report is. Have a good nap.

I'm just trying to help.

You should have started out your story with a catchy opening statement...like this...


The night was sultry.....

And then EVERYONE would have continued to read to find out why the night was sultry.

I think I might start the next story off......

...After calling Pikkkles mom a cab at 3AM.....

[The Big Pickle]

Stop All Production?

I like it.

No, Arch, you are talking way over my head now on the programmer end of things. I am just talking as a poor computer challenged fukk that has to log into this wretched program to try and get my Amex bill paid. A good deal of the problem lays at my companies feet in that they want to split up the charges to countless WOs, 90+% of which are paid by 1 client, the TSA. Actually, they aren't paid individually. We have a maintenance contract with TSA that covers T&M for one flat fee. So, breaking it down beyond, maybe the airport, or possibly equipment model, of which there are two, is first off, a waste of time and second, shitty data anyway. It is a bunch of fair tales.

Unfortunately, management these days have an idea that more data is better. Some fukking times more data is just more and frequently the result is workers just pulling numbers out of their asses. When a significant amount of your work day ends up being spent essentially quantifying what you did, you have a problem. I was recently listening to some radio financial talk show where they discussed this topic. They talked about how managers are obsessed with data collection to the point where it is killing productivity. Saw it at my last job and I see it now, even worse. They sited statistics about how US productivity numbers over the last decade have plateaued and possibly even started dropping, after a few decades of big productivity increases. And they seemed to believe that this very topic is the reason for the slowing of productivity growth.

Oh geessh...here comes that sleepy feeling again. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[Screw_Michigan]

Suckaholic, we use Concur at work at it is usually pretty smooth. Sorry to hear it has been acquired by SAP. Always wondered what the fukkk SAP was, always saw it advertised at Rangers games and MSG.

[Arch Angel]

Stan, I worry about you sometimes.........

When I go to Madison, I will buy you a drink at a bar and watch your skills in picking up women so these posters can get off you about....the other way <wink>.

And if you think your parody or racist remarks bother me, they don't. That is your schtick and it has been for years and just like Mvscal who is much worse, but he and I get along quite fine.

[The Big Pickle]

Stan, I worry about you sometimes.........

When I go to Madison, I will buy you a drink at a bar and watch your skills in picking up women so these posters can get off you about....the other way <wink>.

And if you think your parody or racist remarks bother me, they don't. That is your schtick and it has been for years and just like Mvscal who is much worse, but he and I get along quite fine.

Yeah, we cool. By the way, I worked at Rockwell too. I was in Garden Grove and Seal Beach. :)

[Arch Angel]

I remember you telling me that or you mentioned Seal Beach and Rockwell in the same post and I put the two together. That is like the processing center or benefits and pay or something like that. From your background I totally believed you've work there. I was at the Cedar Rapids location for long while. The reason I am not there now is because I married a Wisconsinite.

[Goober McTuber]

I remember you telling me that or you mentioned Seal Beach and Rockwell in the same post and I put the two together. That is like the processing center or benefits and pay or something like that. From your background I totally believed you've work there.

So they had a shitty bar there?

[Screw_Michigan]

So they had a shitty bar there?

Glory hole

[Moving Sale]

And if you think your parody or racist remarks bother me, they don't. That is your schtick and it has been for years and just like Mvscal who is much worse, but he and I get along quite fine.

Of course they don't worry you. You hate your own skin.

[Rooster]

We used SAP at Lockheed Martin and I used to want to cause pain to small animals and children after wrestling with their expense reporting program. I asked one of our IT wizards about one day and he flat out told me it was byzantinian and complicated on purpose so that employees would eat the cost of their expenses. In doing so, any costs saved by the managers over the course of the year resulted in a bonus check that would be cut for a percentage of the money saved.

I called the help center to see if I could glean some knowledge of the process of figuring out the report. I was told by an electronic voice that the help center gave a telephonic class on the expense reporting system at 10:00 am every second Wednesday of the month. So I waited until the second Wednesday, called in, and listened to about 30 people chime in every few seconds to get their questions answered. The lady would politely welcome them to the conference call and ask them to hold their questions until everyone had logged in. This went on for twenty minutes. Finally, she began. Slowly and tediously she explained where to put out name on the report. Then our employees number. Then our division. And our manager's name. At 10:45 we had completed the first block-- all stuff that was self explanatory, when she announced that she had a doctor's appointment at 11:00, so could we all come back in a month and she would continue with the class?

Worthless.

The problem was, LM issued credit cards in our name, so the debt was held by the employee who used the card. Furthermore, they wouldn't pay the creditors until 180 days had passed, which placed us in danger of hurting our credit rating. To top it all off, travel, accommodations, and food were all to be arranged and placed on the card for reimbursement. If you used your own personal card, whatever you spent was on you and wouldn't be paid back by the company.

Eventually they paid it off, but the stress and frustration of the whole process made me eternally pissed off at the corporate world and the games they played with their employees.

[War Wagon]

SAP? you mean STOP ALL PRODUCTION?

We have a few steel and/or aluminum suppliers who recently went thru that OS change and it practically shut them down for a few weeks. My purchase orders were late which almost shut us down as well and would have in some cases if I didn't keep enough "safety stock" available, usually about one month supply.

Eventually they got the bugs worked out and orders are processed much quicker now. But that initial change over sucks and leaves some scars.

[Moving Sale]

Don't worry about the spamming fatty, 14/88 has your back.

[Arch Angel]

We used SAP at Lockheed Martin and I used to want to cause pain to small animals and children after wrestling with their expense reporting program. I asked one of our IT wizards about one day and he flat out told me it was byzantinian and complicated on purpose so that employees would eat the cost of their expenses. In doing so, any costs saved by the managers over the course of the year resulted in a bonus check that would be cut for a percentage of the money saved.

I called the help center to see if I could glean some knowledge of the process of figuring out the report. I was told by an electronic voice that the help center gave a telephonic class on the expense reporting system at 10:00 am every second Wednesday of the month. So I waited until the second Wednesday, called in, and listened to about 30 people chime in every few seconds to get their questions answered. The lady would politely welcome them to the conference call and ask them to hold their questions until everyone had logged in. This went on for twenty minutes. Finally, she began. Slowly and tediously she explained where to put out name on the report. Then our employees number. Then our division. And our manager's name. At 10:45 we had completed the first block-- all stuff that was self explanatory, when she announced that she had a doctor's appointment at 11:00, so could we all come back in a month and she would continue with the class?

Worthless.

The problem was, LM issued credit cards in our name, so the debt was held by the employee who used the card. Furthermore, they wouldn't pay the creditors until 180 days had passed, which placed us in danger of hurting our credit rating. To top it all off, travel, accommodations, and food were all to be arranged and placed on the card for reimbursement. If you used your own personal card, whatever you spent was on you and wouldn't be paid back by the company.

Eventually they paid it off, but the stress and frustration of the whole process made me eternally pissed off at the corporate world and the games they played with their employees.

I went from Lockheed Martin to Rockwell Collins. A Unix base system to Win 2000 and boy that was a big change and then SAP a couple of years later. I swear they were bringing programmers in from all over the world, Herms/Israelis/Indians/Pakistanis because it is a German base system at first, the learning curve was really high. I remember starting out in ABAP and I was like, "this shit doesn't make sense, bring back DBase"

Oh and Moving Fail is a whiny ass bitch.

[Moving Sale]

On tilt much Tommy?

[Arch Angel]

We use MS Dynamics AX which, along with Sarin Gas and Genocide, has been denounced by most countries as a War Crime

Yeah, we heard some not good things about them. Talk about proprietary nightmare.

[War Wagon]

Has anyone ever used a JD Edwards type system? Also known as World Vision or AS400.

My company installed that in 1998, replacing the IBM dinosaur MAPICS. Green Bar print outs ring a bell? Perforated margins on both sides you had to tear off.

JDE takes a long time to learn and has some unexplainable glitches now and then but I'm comfortable with it. There's been talk and meetings lately about replacing it. Not looking forward to it as this old dog doesn't care to jump thru hoops learning new tricks.

[smackaholic]

What I really can't comprehend is why it takes 10X longer to do than it did in the dark ages with pen and paper. Someone on some site reviewing it said it would be quicker using stone tablets and a chisel.

[smackaholic]

We use MS Dynamics AX which, along with Sarin Gas and Genocide, has been denounced by most countries as a War Crime

That's a good way of putting it. I have heard that the military is looking into having detainees document their expenses on DTS (defense travel system) as a replacement for waterboarding. I doubt the lawyers will OK it though as it is clearly a voilation of the Geneva Convention.

[Screw_Michigan]

Do you think the defense secretary has to use DTS?

[smackaholic]

Do you think the defense secretary has to use DTS?

The defense secretary's secretary has to use it. If he did, he'd fire the guy that picked it. Do you have any experience with the dreadful travel system?

[Screw_Michigan]

Nope, not DoD.

[smackaholic]

Smackie works for DoD.

Smackie, do you have to use DTS?

[Arch Angel]

Has anyone ever used a JD Edwards type system? Also known as World Vision or AS400.

My company installed that in 1998, replacing the IBM dinosaur MAPICS. Green Bar print outs ring a bell? Perforated margins on both sides you had to tear off.

JDE takes a long time to learn and has some unexplainable glitches now and then but I'm comfortable with it. There's been talk and meetings lately about replacing it. Not looking forward to it as this old dog doesn't care to jump thru hoops learning new tricks.

We still use green bar huge ass printers. What a hodgepodge of shit we have here and I have to keep everything working smoothly. I almost have everything moved to .Net but then they decided to retire the 28 year old AS400 system equivalent system to a newer modern age type that everyone hates.

Converting VB, Python and Ajax to C# and Java Script has been a total pain in the ass. Then on top of it, I have an SQL backend and they have a Oracle douchebase with all the tables hidden. My fingers hurt from all that typing. Doing synonyms is a pain in that ass when you have 1000's of tables.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

We use MS Dynamics AX which, along with Sarin Gas and Genocide, has been denounced by most countries as a War Crime

...and when I tell friends in their respective procurement departments to steer way fukken clear of vendor lock-in, they think I'm just being a bomb-throwing, anarchist contrarian...or some kind of Dins-ian smart-ass...


"Hey man, you ever try heroin? Here...the first bag is on the house...because, you know...we're bros..."

[War Wagon]

We still use green bar huge ass printers.

That's incredible, thought those green bar print outs had been obsoleted about the same time as WebTV.

My condolence over the mountains of paper work you must have to deal with on a daily basis, not to mention the storage space you have to lease just to hold a few years worth of records. It takes a small army of data entry geeks to maintain that system.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Yeah, pretty much.
:|

[LTS TRN 2]

As a business owner I want my employees to (pretend to be real)

As a business owner, I want everyone to remember that steel-framed buildings don't collapse because of fire, and "pilots" who can't fly a Cessna, really can't suddenly fly a jetliner like Col (excuse me, General) Chuck Yeager.

And business is good. Especially for mordant entities from Planet Death, like this rabbi..


WW

[BSmack]

We use MS Dynamics AX which, along with Sarin Gas and Genocide, has been denounced by most countries as a War Crime

Yeah, we heard some not good things about them. Talk about proprietary nightmare.

we used to do ours on an excel ss that took 10 minutes to complete. we'd attach our receipts and voila! move on with our lives

That 10 minutes is now an hour, and the redundancy of entering the same data (date / location etc.) on itemization makes a Moving Sale post fresh by comparison

I'd never really understood the levels of hate for MS (that's Microsoft, not Moving Sale) I see on the web until I started using this clusterfuck and their CRM.

Now I understand just fine

Yeah my company uses that Dynamics. It is a monumental piece of shit. But Dynamics is nirvana compared to Sharepoint; which is how we track requests. And the latest brilliant move has been the switch from Office to Office 365. All of the slow performance combined with half the functionality. Yeah fuck MS.

[Arch Angel]

We use MS Dynamics AX which, along with Sarin Gas and Genocide, has been denounced by most countries as a War Crime

...and when I tell friends in their respective procurement departments to steer way fukken clear of vendor lock-in, they think I'm just being a bomb-throwing, anarchist contrarian...or some kind of Dins-ian smart-ass...


"Hey man, you ever try heroin? Here...the first bag is on the house...because, you know...we're bros..."

That is why we didn't pick them. Our way or you're fucked.

[Arch Angel]

We still use green bar huge ass printers.

That's incredible, thought those green bar print outs had been obsoleted about the same time as WebTV.

My condolence over the mountains of paper work you must have to deal with on a daily basis, not to mention the storage space you have to lease just to hold a few years worth of records. It takes a small army of data entry geeks to maintain that system.

We have seven of them and we killed so many trees it is not funny. The previous Comptroller wanted everything on green bar because his ass did not want to open a PDF that I wrote programs for to give it to him to save trees. He retired thank God for hat.

The daily reports went from a box of32000 sheets a morning to around 60, I converted the rest to PDF so if you want to see it, download it or open the PDF my program created (I automated most of it).

[smackaholic]

Since we are talking about other work programs, are any of you choads unlucky enough to have to deals with fleetmatics? It's what we use for field service reports. Best thing I can say for it is "at least it's not sAP". It is not Terri or to use in real time but if you have to go back and mod a closed report.....ughhhh.

[Dinsdale]

I've done contract work for medical outfits, which have HIPPA rules and often some really stupid proprietary software.

Stupid medical software makes other types of stupid fucking software seem reasonable.