SAP Concur Customers, Are You Overlooking Processes Efficiency?

Are you getting the most out of your SAP Concur solution?

As a customer, you’ve realized the value in automating your spend management processes. You’ve made it easier for employees to avoid errors, submit receipts quickly, and do it all on the go. But organizations that assume automation alone is the primary benefit of spend management technology are selling themselves short.

If you have adopted the “set and forget it” approach, you’re likely overlooking areas where your processes can be optimized further to realize even greater ROI. Unsure where to start? Check out how efficient your expense processing cycles are, from report submission and approval to payment. Here are four reasons why efficiency should be an area of focus:

Time back to drive business

As a customer, long gone are the days of employees piecemealing together paper receipts and tracking down expenses. Because expense reports can be submitted by end users more easily, your back-office staff can do more with less. But can your staff be even more productive?

When you focus on the time it takes to approve and pay across your business, your employees can process more expenses even faster. In fact, IDC research found accounts payable staff were 30% more efficient with an optimized SAP Concur solution. At the same time, your audit staff get access to the financial data they need to do their jobs even quicker. The same IDC study found that with optimized spend management processes, efficiency for audit staff improved by 28%.

Increased efficiency for your people means increased value for your business. With less time being spent doing administrative tasks like processing payments or hunting down financial data to audit, employees can focus on more strategic initiatives that provide greater value. That’s something both you and your employees can celebrate.

Better visibility into total spend

Nothing is worse than suddenly finding you still have outstanding liabilities at the end of the quarter. Whether expenses are unassigned or assigned to a report but not yet paid, outstanding accruals can make it difficult to see where your total spend stands for the quarter. By optimizing your expense processes and reducing the time it takes for approvals and payments, you can get a more accurate view into what has actually been spent, improved financial reporting, and can better manage cash flow.

Maximized rebates on corporate cards

With SAP Concur, you’ve already cut down on the costs of labor. But the cost benefits don’t have to stop there. If late fees from delayed payments are already getting you down, your card rebates are also being impacted. Optimizing your processes can ensure you get more bang for your buck by allowing you to realize a significantly higher rebate by reducing the time to approve and pay your corporate cards.

Increases in rebates are leveraged by many customers to help pay for their SAP Concur solution. In fact, one major motion picture studio drove an additional $1.5m in annual spend onto their card program, which yielded more than $80,000 in rebates.

Fewer employee late fees

Think about how long it takes your employees to submit a report. The longer it takes, the less time managers have for review to either approve or send back before processing and payment take place. As a result, the total workflow increases the amount of time it takes to pay the corporate card, resulting in late fees associated with the delay of payment. And nobody likes that.

Efficient processes reduce the time it takes to submit a report, allows more time for accurate review, and ensures that payments will be made on time, every time. That means not only will corporate cards get paid quicker, but so will employee reimbursements – a win all around.

To learn more about the benefits of thinking beyond automation, download the full IDC report.