Travel budgets can be one of the largest indirect expenses for an organization to monitor and often represent one of the most highly disjointed processes to manage. For the employee, aligning with travel policies, planning travel, and filing expense reports can be a manually intensive, time consuming process. For department leaders, the story is not particularly better. A fragmented travel and expense (T&E) process makes it difficult to see where and when money is being spent. It brings a new layer of challenges to audit activities. It makes it difficult to get a clear tax picture and can even leave opportunities for fraud. And in the current era of digital engagement, it does little to bolster employee productivity and satisfaction.

Solutions from SAP Concur offer a path to a more streamlined and user-friendly T&E process. With SAP Concur® Travel & Expense, organizations can simplify and integrate their T&E activities through an intuitive cloud-based solution. Getting the most value from SAP Concur Travel & Expense, however, requires a deep understanding of your current processes, a vision for the future, and a strategy to help you get there. We can help.

A cloud-based journey

With SAP Concur Travel & Expense, employees can have an efficient mobile, cloud-based T&E experience. Instead of stuffing a growing collection of receipts into a laptop bag and then piecing them all together in an expense report, an employee can leverage SAP Concur Travel & Expense to manage receipts and T&E transactions en route. For starters, the SAP Concur Travel & Expense application folds in automated expense documentation and functionality for third party apps that an employee might use while on the go, like ground transportation. When it comes to printed receipts, the camera on an employee’s mobile device is the starting point.

A photo of a receipt and optical character recognition enable SAP Concur Travel & Expense to automate receipt data entry. The solution also gives the traveler the ability to create expense reports offline—on a mobile device while on a plane, for example— and then submit them for approval upon enabling wireless after landing. SAP Concur Travel and Expense also can make it easier for travelers to comply with company specific policies while on the go. It can automatically flag receipts that are claimed multiple times on the same expense report and notify managers for unassigned company-paid expenses, helping auditors and approvers identify conflicts and even fraud before they strike. Ultimately, the cloud-based solution can help leaders develop a clearer information picture across travel and expense—one that can deliver insights for improved operational and strategic decision-making, from vendor considerations to global tax strategies.

How we can help

Deloitte travel and expense management specialists understand that even something as routine as expense accounting is deeply connected to the many other moving parts in finance and HR organizations. They understand that CFOs and CHROs working at the strategic level are looking for ways to improve their processes and policy compliance without causing unwanted consequences elsewhere.

By deploying SAP Concur with our Enterprise Value Delivery (EVD) for Cloud methodology, we can help you avoid unwanted consequences while adding major value to projects. EVD for Cloud stands as an established and time-tested process for accelerating transformations by completing tasks and deliverables based on the particular phase of the implementation lifecycle. It’s an integrated, multidisciplinary implementation approach for providing consistent delivery across system projects, helping to ensure that activities are linked to business results — not simply technical requirements. Understanding processes is where Deloitte excels. Through our “business first” approach, we have helped organizations across industries, and we possess deep, specific experience on T&E issues. We bring unparalleled experiences like those to bear in our work with every client when putting travel and expense solutions to work.

Strategy, technical implementation, training, and post-go-live support are only a few of the reasons clients come to us for help with:

• Business case development, analysis of current-state compliance levels, and future-state cost savings modeling
• Assessment of current business processes in light of future-state objectives and desired outcomes
• Policy refresh and development and compliance management procedures
• Travel and expense process standardization and automation
• Facilitation of tight integration of T&E processes and data into an existing solution ecosystem including HR, payroll, and accounts payable
• Integration of SAP Concur Travel & Expense within an SAP environment or other backend ERP/legacy systems
• PCI compliance for credit card transaction processing
• Specialized payment management with banks
• Organizational change readiness assessment
• and change management, communications,
• and tailored training activities

We also bring critical SAP know-how to the table—an important factor, since SAP Concur Travel & Expense is an integral part of the SAP family of solutions. Our local team in Luxembourg and our network of more than 16,000 business and technology professionals focused on SAP means we can help address your T&E challenges across the globe and across industries. Not only do we provide critical guidance on business processes and technology, we also can serve as a single point of contact for your related SAP needs. Since SAP Concur is a cloud-based solution, we also can assist with integration to any back-end ERP system by leveraging our technology practice experience with leading ERP solutions.

Potential bottom-line benefits

• Visibility and control of travel costs
• Facilitate corporate policy compliance
• Get a clearer view of T&E information to help improve tax and audit activities worldwide
• Increase process efficiency
• Boost employee productivity and satisfaction by reducing time spent on administrative tasks
• Accelerate deployment
• Automatically update regulatory rules
• Quickly deploy a preconfigured solution for use in more than 100 countries, using an international template
• Lower total cost of ownership, with no licensing required

Connect with us about SAP Concur to get the conversation started and see a demo, or agree for a speaking session to see how Deloitte can help you reimagine everything—an entire universe of possibilities with SAP solutions.