Concur, provider of services for travel and expense management, announced this morning that the company will be offering a bundled program that it says will help small businesses better manage travel itineraries and expense accounting. This integrated system, which combines the expense report capabilities of Concur Breeze and the itinerary services of TripIt Pro, will help small businesses solve a long-standing problem, according to Raj Singh, President and COO of Concur.
“There’s a real problem that exists for small businesses,” Singh said, “and it is the problem in the travel process of both how you manage your itinerary and then how you take all that information when you come back from your trip and manage your expense account.”
Singh said that the integration of TripIt and Concur’s services will allow small business owners to easily track their own and their employees’ itineraries, travel spending, flight options and flight alerts. Users will then be able to synchronize that information directly with their expense accounts. He said that many large companies have systems in place for managing travel this way, but that small businesses also stand to benefit from more efficient travel planning.
Gregg Brockway, executive vice president and general manager for the TripIt business unit, said that TripIt first came across this problem in the course of their work with commercial travelers. “While solving problems for individual travelers we uncovered this problem for the companies they work for, and that’s part of how we ended up becoming part of Concur,” Brockway said.
Concur absorbed TripIt after a deal struck in January to buy the company for close to $120 million.
“We send a lot of time with small businesses and even more time with small business travelers,” Brockway said. “TripIt has millions of travelers and most of them are small business travelers and many of them are very vocal.”
Read more about TripIt.
