Coincide

Primary User for MHacks company looking at personal transactions
Looking at all MHacks Company transactions
Primary user for Martha Cook (different Concur instance) looking at personal transactions
Looking at all Martha Cook transactions

Inspiration

Recently, I submitted an expense report through concur, which was incredibly easy, but the organization cutting the check sent it to the wrong address. What a pain? Why can't this be as easy as venmo? So I decided to work on an easy way to process concur expense reports into direct bank transactions

What it does

Our front end allows Concur administrative users to hook up their concur instances to our system, and add employees, who can add their banking information. The front end provides employees a list of transactions processed through Coincide, and administrative users for a company a list of all transactions processed on that companies behalf, along with transaction confirmation numbers, and source and destination account information.

Our back end, written in python, polls the Concur API on behalf of each company connected to Coincide, when it finds a fully approved unpaid expense report for a user it has banking information for it requests a transfer using the Nessie API by Capital One, records the transaction for the front end to access later, and informs Concur that the expense report has been paid.

How we built it

Lots of red bull! But seriously, we started by white boarding the main elements (The front end, the Concur interface, the Nessi interface, and the back end). We then broke down each element into what we needed from it, and what the business intelligence running in the background would do (in psuedocode), after that, it was a "breeze" to actually implement.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some issues getting the APIs to play nice, but this was mainly due to forgotten headers. Initial authentication with the Concur API proved somewhat challenging, but once we got the hang of it it was quite straight forward. The biggest challenge for sure though was the rails component, with one of us having never used rails and the other being two years out of date on it, it was quite a challenge to get the front end up and running.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The front end looks beautiful (thanks bootstrap), but more importantly, the back end is is able to efficiently handle many expense reports requiring payment at a time.