What the Web did for books, music and flea markets, Concur Technologies is doing for expense reports.

DO YOU HATE filling out expense reports? Steve Singh is chairman, president and CEO of Concur Technologies (www.concur.com), a Redmond, Wash., company that takes the paper out of this odious task. Concur’s software not only lets travelers track and file expenses online, but also provides a fax service for digitizing receipts and a voice-access service for phoning in expense items. Singh went into business for himself shortly after obtaining an electrical engineering degree from the University of Michigan, then sold his firm to Contact Software in 1992.

How did you get involved in the technology business?
I started my own software company when I was 21. I was sitting in a restaurant in Sausalito next to a guy who seemed to be pulling his hair out. I asked what was wrong; he said he was having a hard time solving a programming problem for the new Apple Macintosh. I was fresh out of college, looking for something to do. I helped him solve that programming problem, and he said, “Are you interested in helping me write this application?” The next week, I quit my job and started writing a program that we and six other guys later sold to Microsoft, called Microsoft Works. It ended up being a big success, and after that, I got the bug for the technology world.

Then I got interested in how salespeople work, the tools they use to keep track of customers. What we found-and this was way before Siebel and Salesforce.com and companies like that-was that people were using Franklin day planners, notepads and sticky notes. So, we built a contact management application called ACT!, and it ended up being the best-selling contact management application around.

What led to Concur was a very personal experience. I was vice president of product development at Contact Software, the company that made ACT!. I traveled extensively, and I would routinely be six to 12 months behind in filing expense reports. We finally sold Contact Software to Symantec, and when my employment contract with Symantec ran out, I sat down with the cofounders of the company and said, “There’s got to be other people who have this problem with filing expense reports.” Also, the accounting department has to hate this, because they don’t know what’s outstanding as far as corporate debt. We found there were no real tools out there for filing expense reports. That’s how we got involved.

How difficult was it for you to make the transition from entrepreneur to employee?
It was a little difficult. I think most entrepreneurs have a hard time working for other people. It was hard enough that I had to go through a transition process and understand what really motivated me. I found that what motivated me was building things that other people used-or building things that would outlast me. Building an enduring company is a strong part of what makes me happy, and that’s what allowed me to transition.

Your product saves money for companies, but how do business travelers benefit?
In filling out expense reports, you’d typically reach into your briefcase after a business trip and pull out a stack of receipts. Then you’d attach them to a piece of paper and itemize each receipt onto a form. It’s just a laborious process. Most people put it off, or they ask somebody else to do it, like an administrative assistant. It’s incredibly slow-it takes 30 minutes or so to fill out the typical expense report.

Here’s how I fill out expense reports: I use my American Express Corporate Card, and it automatically captures all my corporate travel transactions. So, whenever I fill out my expense report, I’ve got all my transactions waiting online. I just click on an item and drag it into my expense report bucket. My airfare from Seattle to Boston, for example: I can click and drag that into my expense report, and the product will say, “I know you flew from Seattle to Boston on American Airlines, you paid this much money, and it’s within your corporate policy.” Or, if I’m in a city and I [take] a taxi, I’ll grab my cell phone and say, “Taxicab today, Boston, $8, put it on my Boston expense report,” and it will automatically fill the information in for me. Now it takes me five or six minutes to fill out an expense report instead of 30 minutes. And it’s completely Web-based. You can walk up to any computer or kiosk with Web access, log on and file your expense report.

The other benefit for an individual traveler is the convenience of getting paid faster. In a paper-based expense report world, our average customers were taking about three or four weeks to pay the employee. Now it’s anywhere from a couple of days to two weeks.

What if travelers still get paper receipts for some things?
Because the IRS requires companies to hang onto receipts, most of them take these receipts, put them in boxes, ship them to Iron Mountain and pay a monthly storage fee. We were able to make it a lot cheaper and easier. Now the employee takes the receipts, tapes them to a piece of paper or puts them in a clear plastic sleeve, walks to the fax machine and sends it to a specific number, where the receipts are imaged and attached to their expense report. They’re available online and they’re IRS-compliant, so they can throw away the paper receipts.

Some business travelers might resent the “corporate policy compliance” piece of your software as a Big Brother. What would you say to them?
At the end of the day, they’re going to have compliance, whether it’s paper-based or electronic. With electronic, you know ahead of time whether you’re compliant. With paper-based, you may fill out your expense report and then find out you’re not going to get reimbursed for a particular piece of it. Our corporate customers tell us the compliance piece helps educate employees as to what’s accepted by the company. More importantly, with the current focus on corporate governance-the whole push from the Sarbanes-Oxley law-the compliance piece ensures that there’s never an embarrassing situation.

Based on your corporate customers’ changes in policies and budgets, what trends should business travelers expect to see in trip-planning?
There’s a lot more focus on pre-trip approvals, because companies want to keep closer tabs on their costs. We’re seeing a greater focus on driving employees to use preferred vendors. For example, when you go to New York, many companies are trying to consolidate all their hotel business to one location to get a better rate. Our customers are also using this information with airlines, committing to a certain number of flight segments in exchange for fixed flight rates.

Through the expense reports that we process for 1,700 customers, we’re seeing a lot more focus on low-cost air carriers. The number of expense reports where JetBlue or ATA is the carrier has gone up dramatically compared to five years ago. Some corporations are incorporating that into their travel policies now.

How often do you travel?
I travel maybe two weeks out of the month. I use discount airlines a lot more than I used to. JetBlue is the number-one airline I fly these days. I like it because it’s low-cost, no-frills; it has great service; and I love the fact that there’s television access on the flight. It’s one of the few times I have to watch TV. I have three kids, so even when I’m home, I don’t get a lot of time to watch TV.

What tactics do you use to make business travel less stressful?
If you take the time to learn technology and use it, you can make business travel incredibly easy. One thing I use is a phone, relatively new on the market, called a VOQ phone, from Sierra Wireless. It’s a smart phone-a cellular phone that integrates your email and calendar right into the phone. It allows me to be in touch with the office at any time, so I’m never out of date, never behind schedule.

I also use a Sprint Wireless card, so when I’m waiting at an airport, I just plug it into my computer, download all my email, and I can respond to the longer ones. But if I’m taking a trip of two days or less, I don’t even take my computer with me, just my VOQ phone. It’s got a foldable keyboard right in it-it’s a fantastic device. I can even take a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and put it on my phone for investor conferences and such. There’s always a presentation machine I can plug my phone into, and it projects the presentation onscreen.

I also use it for my own product--I can log onto the Web from the phone and fill out my expense report. And it fits in my pocket.

The other thing about business travel-you’ve got to allocate a little more time to travel. You see so many people who are so rushed, aggravated and typically hard to get along with. And there’s just no reason for that. If you just allocate a little more time-get to the airport a little earlier and prepare for your meetings ahead of time-you get to a point where it is just not as stressful.