Employees can 'swipe-a-receipt' on AmEx for the Boss

INDIA: Concur, a provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions, announced that together with American Express, it's marrying the convenience of transaction alerts near the time of card swipe with the ease of simply snapping a photo of a receipt to "automagically" create an expense on-the-go without any typing required.

Concur, as claimed in the announcement, is the first company to integrate new technology from American Express that pushes out near real-time data to third-party expense providers.

This means that American Express Corporate Card members that use Concur Expense and Concur's new OCR-powered receipt capture application, ExpenseIt, will be reminded to capture a photo of their receipt to have all the details of the expense auto-populated from the image. The feature is slated to be available in fall 2013, as further explained.

"We are delighted to bring this integration to our Corporate Cardmembers with a partner that understands the needs of the business traveler," said Jay Cary, Vice President, Digital, Global Corporate Payments at American Express. "Rather than having a stack of paper receipts to deal with after a business trip, Cardmembers will receive helpful reminders to snap a photo of a receipt moments after swiping their card. ExpenseIt will create the expense right from the receipt image and export it to Concur Expense automatically, so the traveler can get back to the business at hand."

Partners for half a decade, American Express and Concur have helped companies of all sizes in more than 15 markets around the world optimize their expense management programs. Companies that integrate American Express payment data with Concur Expense can benefit from higher quality and more robust data, which ultimately helps control spending and drive savings to the bottom line.

Barry Padgett, Executive Vice President, Concur Traveler Services added. "Because employees are reminded to capture expenses on-the-go, companies get a closer to real-time view into actual spend. The tedious manual entry goes away, and audit and approval times shrink because the receipt images are automatically attached to individual expenses. It's a no-brainer."