The SAP Concur suite of solutions is designed for today’s Finance functions to help businesses manage, quite literally, every aspect of spending, in one platform.

Across a typical organization there’s usually a very healthy flow of payments, and tracking every penny has, until now, required many members of staff in Finance to keep on top of it all. Those staff are typically required to manually copy information, from paper invoices or even hand-written receipts, into larger ERP systems or finance software. From there, it’s a series of stepwise processes to ensure timely expense validation & payment, invoice payments, the issue of POs, and the endless cross-checking of all figures against supplied paperwork against other sources, such as goods inwards.

This is time-intensive and often error-prone, with mistakes creeping in as staff miss important items in amongst multiple repetitions of the same data entries and correlations. The more errors that occur, the greater the time required to solve issues and the Finance Department can easily spend all its time correcting mistakes and swimming hard, just to tread water.

The result is a finance function in the enterprise that merely breaks even – justifying its existence as a valuable provider of an accurate service, but, unfortunately, not a strategic player at the heart of the organization.

Source: SAP Concur

But with Concur Expense, Concur Travel and Concur Invoice, companies have the tools they need not only to automate the vast majority of this iterative, dull manual labor but also gain the ability to surface insight from the accumulated date that’s of significant value. The holistic view of expenses, travel and spend in general means companies get greater visibility into who makes payments to whom, and when. From this data, simple trend analysis (out of the question given the weight of the manual workload, previously) can expose ways and means to improve efficiency, save money and generally, create measurable value for the business.

At the heart of these facilities is the SAP Concur cloud-based engine, which allows access to finance data 24/7, from anywhere where there’s a simple internet connection. The SAP Concur mobile app provides a powerful way with which travel details, spend, invoices and expenses can be submitted while out traveling on business— or at an office desk, too. The app acts as the gathering device for expense details, receipts and extraneous entries in a highly-usable, powerful platform.

The same app is used to approve expense claims (even via complex approval frameworks), or raise queries, and the app uses the same data as the rest of the spend management system, meaning that data agglomeration and interchange is baked-in. Therefore, data entered out on the road or complex POs raised are normalized to the same data repository, allowing powerful oversight by management, and more accurate tracking and real-time updates to the financial position as they occur.

With invoices captured electronically and, if necessary, processed by the OCR routines in the platform, the time-intensive process of matching invoices to POs and goods inwards is fully-automated, in the same way that expense approvals and travel costs can be granted according to predefined policies.

Source: SAP Concur

In addition to saving huge amounts of staff resources (average savings are US$1.9 million per annum and an ROI of 650 percent over three years), strategically-minded Finance Departments can capture early payment discounts, cut out overpayment or double payments, and ensure full and open trust between employees and the enterprise with regards expenses and costs.

Additionally, the data platform is secure and safe to use, so issues concerning data protection, privacy and governance are addressed by the solutions. Adherence to legislation concerning finances and data seamlessly extends into the overall payment management system, as the platform integrates with other systems (like ERPs, QuickBooks, HR and CRM systems). The robust SAP cloud rapidly becomes the go-to source of information for all payment, expense, and travel cost information, one that integrates with larger, overarching legacy systems with ease.

From managers monitoring spending to high-level oversight and reporting possibilities, the SAP Concur spending management offerings provide a data-driven system that will change the way your enterprise does business. By leveraging the in-built productivity tools, companies gain an end-to-end control system over this most manually-based and complex area of enterprise finance.

Get in touch with a representative local to you, today, to find out about how SAP Concur can power the entire travel, expense and spend systems of your business. Sign up now for your free test drive.