Concur and Office 365 integration: Meeting business travelers where they are

Office 365 is skyrocketing among business users. Nearly 70 million professionals are actively using Office 365 each month, says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and according to Okta, Office 365 is now the most deployed app among 2000 business customers.

At the same time, more than 40 million business professionals are registered users of Concur travel and expense management solutions. Each year, Concur processes more than 150 million billable transactions on behalf of our 33,000 customers worldwide.

That’s a lot of business professionals who could save a lot of time and energy if Concur and Microsoft integrated those user experiences. If we could make it seamless to book travel and build error-free expense reports directly from the business apps people use every day, we could create a great experience and help professionals stay focused on what drives them.

Concur is in the business of effortless experiences, so that’s exactly we’re doing. Concur Labs, which builds prototypes and new test interfaces, is collaborating with Microsoft Office developers to integrate the travel and expense process into Microsoft Outlook 365. Here are a few of the exciting features we will bring to our customers:

Submit expenses right from the Outlook Inbox

The days of paper receipts are quickly passing, and these days, your airline or hotel typically sends an electronic receipt and itinerary via email. 

What if a busy professional could have those email receipts automatically identified and tagged when received? When ready to submit the expense, the user simply clicks “Send to Concur,” and the receipt is submitted to his or her Concur Expense report. We think that’s a great experience, and here it is in prototype:

Book Travel from Outlook Calendar

Imagine the Outlook calendar is smart enough to know an employee is taking a business trip as soon as a meeting is scheduled in a different city, and then makes it easy to book travel right then and there.

We think this is another great experience. When business travel plans are added to an Outlook calendar, the user will have the option to book travel right then and would see travel options pop up in the Details pane for those plans. The business traveler will have the option to book flight, hotel, and transportation for that city. Even better, Concur will read the trip dates and suggest options based on company travel policy.

Here’s what it looks like:

“It’s all part of our goal to meet business travelers where they are,” says Barry Padgett, Chief Product Officer for Concur. “We’re continually in the process of collaborating with partners, building unique concepts and rapid prototyping of new ideas.”