BELFOR, a leader in property restoration and disaster recovery, knows a thing or two about fixing what's broken. When Concur failed to meet its unique business requirements and caused inefficiencies, the organization began looking for a solution to restore flexibility and usability to their expense management process.

The organization processes 12,000+ expense reports annually. Employees felt Concur's interface was difficult to navigate and lacked user-friendly mobile features. Administrators were unable to configure the system to work for them, instead of against them. In response, finance developed workarounds outside of the system which created risky inefficiencies.

BELFOR's motivation to move away from Concur was based on the platform's:

  • Inflexible configuration capabilities, unable to address their custom needs
  • Poor navigation which contributed to a frustrating user experience
  • Lack of satisfactory customer support 

Our latest customer success story details how BELFOR found relief by switching to Emburse Chrome River. Highlights from the publication are shared below. 

”We have a lot of unique business requirements and Concur was not flexible or willing to customize the system the way we wanted. We felt like a small fish in a big pond and we were not receiving the type of support we needed.

– Dawn Conway, Sr. Business Analyst, BELFOR

Restoring configurability, efficiency, and savings

According to Conway, the implementation team at Emburse helped BELFOR optimize its workflows, business rules, integrations, and employee group settings to ensure a successful rollout. “Working with Emburse feels like a true partnership where they really listen to our needs and care about our success and happiness, which is something we didn't have with Concur,” said Conway.

BELFOR's end-users and finance members responded positively to Emburse Chrome River. They praised its ability to simplify navigation and expense allocation. They also embraced a consistent user experience across mobile and desktop applications—a welcomed feature for an organization with thousands of field employees.
Emburse helped streamline approval workflows and optimize routing rules to expedite processing. Employees now get reimbursed within one week, rather than three when they used Concur. The efficiency gains enabled BELFOR to reassign two full-time employees dedicated solely to expense management.

In addition to time savings, BELFOR found significant cost savings. “Emburse Chrome River is three-times more cost-effective than Concur, and we've reduced monthly transactional spend by about 70% since switching,” said Conway.

You can read about the difference Emburse Chrome River made for BELFOR by downloading their customer success story.

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Our choice of Chrome River EXPENSE was made in part due to the very user-friendly interface, easy configurability, and the clear commitment to impactful customer service – all aspects in which Chrome River was the clear winner. While Chrome River is not as large as some of the other vendors we considered, we found that to be a benefit and our due diligence showed that it could support us as well as any large players in the space, along with a personalized level of customer care. Sally Abella, Director of Corporate Travel Harman International
We are excited to be able to enforce much more stringent compliance to our expense guidelines and significantly enhance our expense reporting and analytics. By automating these processes, we will be able to free up AP time formerly spent on manual administrative tasks, and enhance the role by being much more strategic. Ben Zastrow Zelle