SAP Concur allows organizations to follow intelligent spend management, strategize well in advance, and plan for the future.
As companies look towards maintaining discretionary spending and aligning their financial plans with the new hybrid work models, emerging tech such as AI and ML not only makes the process faster, efficient but also helps companies ensure compliance and deliver a seamless employee experience. A lot of companies rejigged their business strategies to tide over future disruptions and maintain growth while adding value for their employees as well as customers. Mr. Ben Price, COO, SAP Concur APAC share more insights on the same
- How can organizations evade out-of-policy claims and expenses that breach regulations?
Many organizations perceived that their policies and processes are acceptable as they have not faced a major issue to contend with. Also, they trust their employees to be transparent about their corporate spending. The new work regime and burgeoning models like hybrid, remote etc. have permanently changed the functioning of an organization to manage their expenses. With growing number of standards and compliances, the need to integrate the right technology to detect and prevent fraud is crucial.
We at SAP Concur are providing various expense and travel solutions to prevent fraud and ensure compliance across the organization by:
- Creating automated expense policies:Organizations are creating automated expense policies for their employees. We work with multiple organizations and helping them craft one unique policy with best practices and robust workflow built in.
- Simplified expense reporting:Our apps make it simple for end-users to submit expenses and receipts, which helps in faster reporting and more accurate data.
- Uncovering hidden spending:We provide full visibility into employees’ spending, even if they book outside of approved tools.
- Audit preparation: Our tools offer an automatically created audit trail for every employee-initiated transaction.
- How effective T&E (travel & expenses) management solutions will enable the organizations to handle business disruption?
Business disruption has created the demand to bolster sales targets and find new suppliers. Quite often, the processes for managing business expenses are being hampered by using manual, disparate systems for data entry and reporting which can lead to fraud and corruption, impacting T&E business. While managing expenses, it is important to bring in efficiencies throughout the expense management value chain and ensuring compliance with corporate policies. The process will provide visibility to business leaders and boards for effective decision-making.
Therefore, there is a need to adopt automated solutions and COVID-19 pandemic has made organizations realize the importance of digital transformation for better processes and operations. The adoption can help organizations of different sizes to improve compliance and reduce risk on travel expense and invoice management.
The T&E management solutions help organizations to transform the way to manage spending and enhance the user experience for their workforce. At the same time, the solutions empower organizations to take advantage of the cloud to get up and running quickly, access the latest updates and take the burden off their IT teams.
- How are AI/ML-powered smart expense management solutions enabling financial transformation of the organizations?
The pandemic has helped the finance and tech leaders to focus more on digitalization, which plays a primary role in supporting critical decision making, business model transformation, revenue & expenditure forecasting. As AI solutions can quickly replicate tasks and processes that were formerly done manually, finance departments of many organizations have started to lean on AI and ML algorithms to make quick decisions backed by near real-time financial transparency to meet their business needs. This technology is helping to solve complex volume of data for financial processes and ensuring real-time decision-making.
Organizations are also now using intelligent expense auditing tool, Intelligent Assistant, that automatically checks expense reports for various issues and anomalies based on employer spend policies.
The tool is helping businesses go beyond automatic data capture and analysis to predicting and making recommendations based on instantaneous analysis of a variety of data sources.
SAP Concur is working on a renewed emphasis on providing digital solutions for processes like expense claims and employee safety. This will give impetus to the use of intelligent digital solutions – like travel and expense solutions – by organizations across all sectors. The solutions allow organizations to harness the power of analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to automate spend management, improve visibility, cost control, budgeting, real-time decision making and compliance.
- How SAP Concur solutions are saving company and employee time for more productive work?
Our solutions automate expense management and minimises the discomfort of expense reports, across geographies. It manages the spending processes, policies, and budgets, for the businesses to focus their time on the bigger picture – not the day-to-day minutia of expense reporting and approvals.
Generally, finance teams face challenges to improve spending compliance and reduce fraud. SAP Concur solutions eliminate the bottlenecks by automating manual tasks and creating integrations to smooth the flow of data and approvals.
Our mobile app also allows employees to capture images of receipts and automatically populate expense reports, which speeds up the process. The integrated travel and expense data with Enterprise resource planning (ERP) helps the organization to get a more complete picture of employees’ spending in reporting dashboards. Our solutions substitute frustrating steps and outdated processes with a simple, energizing, and empathetic experience. As per SAP Intelligent Spend Management report, finance employees save 500 hours a year from an integrated expense, travel, and invoice solution.
In addition, the travel solutions help in making corporate travel management easier by providing access to content from multiple global distribution systems, insights into travel spending and consolidated data from the company’s travel management company (TMC) and location check-ins.
