Keep Your Travel and Expense Management Flexible and Resilient for the Long Haul

We are living in unprecedented times. Many of us are working from home, travel is suspended, and everyone’s top priority is the health and safety of colleagues and customers. Finance leaders and travel managers are surely wondering what the next months will bring and trying to prepare for budget impacts and how travel will be affected going forward.

One thing we know for sure is that paper, e-mail, and spreadsheet-based travel and expense (T&E) management processes have always been inefficient, time-consuming, and error prone. And now, with offices closed around the globe, they are simply unworkable. As we assess where things stand and what the future holds, it’s always a good a time to consider automating your travel and expense management processes to save time, lower costs, and realize efficiencies.  

You have a lot of choices when looking for a T&E management solution – and you need something that will make life and work easier for travelers and travel managers alike. To make the selection process easier, IDC recently conducted a study of the worldwide market options for software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud-enabled T&E management solutions. The report also provides a step-by-step guide on how best to choose a software vendor that is right for you.  

The first thing you need to ask is, “What does my company need?” What are the issues with your current T&E processes and are they technology related? Who at your company should be involved in the vendor selection process and subsequent system deployment? And what will a successful system allow you to do when it is up and running?

When looking at vendors, you should be sure to find one that has experience with your type of company and who understands your business processes, IT landscape, and industry and regulatory requirements. You also want to be sure that vendor can support your users across all geographies.

For small and midsize businesses in particular, the cloud-based SaaS model is ideal in that it can be deployed at a reasonable cost without additional hardware. Cloud applications are also easier and faster to implement, and are automatically upgraded without intervention from your IT team.

When choosing a T&E solution, you need a platform that offers:

• Intelligent workflow automation that lets you and your employees manage routine tasks without user intervention
• Mobile capabilities that allow your people to record expenses and file expense reports from anywhere on any device
• User-friendly, consumer-grade interface that is intuitive and requires minimal user training
• Integration of payments with expense reporting to simplify report creation, increase accuracy, and speed time to reimbursement
• Ability to build specific internal and regulatory compliance into every transaction
• Air-tight data security to fend of data breaches that could result in serious financial losses for your business
• Integration with your ERP, accounts payable, HR, and CRM systems as well as with a wide network of partner systems
• Strong data management capabilities that allow you to coordinate information from dozens of systems and partner entities

When it comes to software capabilities combined with overall solution strategy, the IDC MarketScape named SAP Concur as a leader in SMB global travel and expense management.* Apart from fulfilling all the key solution capabilities listed above, SAP Concur solutions bring your business the added value of decades of development and experience in the T&E arena, strong innovation investment, and a solid global brand that you can count on.

As we all adjust to this moment of volatility and rapid change, you can be confident that SAP Concur solutions will be here to help your business stay adaptable, responsive, and resilient – today, tomorrow, and beyond.   

 Read the IDC MarketScape excerpt to learn more about travel and expense best practices and recommendations. Then visit us at www.concur.ca to get started today.

*IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled SMB Travel and Expense Management Applications 2019 Vendor Assessment, (doc #US45655119, December 2019)