Implementing Electronic Expenses and Receipt Archiving in Italy

Challenge

A new regulatory requirement in Italy required companies to archive expense claim details and imaged receipts locally, every day, and in a government specific format. To meet this requirement, the Italian office of a global cosmetic company needed to implement an electronic expense and receipt archiving solution using data captured by SAP Concur Expense. Without this solution, the company would have to report all expense tax amounts as nondeductible, and would lose significant tax benefits.

The client’s project team encountered several issues providing the data and files in the format requested by the team in Italy. The initial solution design was unreliable and needed to be refined to work properly.

Approach: Think + Do

Acquis had previously helped the client implement SAP Concur Expense globally to more than 85 countries and 100,000 users. Following the success of that effort, the client asked Acquis to help build a new interface between SAP Concur and a third party to support the Italian electronic expense and receipt archiving regulatory requirement. Acquis:

• Developed the design for the new interface, coordinating with the client and external vendors, and aligned the interface to the client’s global T&E strategy;

• Ensured the new interface was scalable to meet future demands and requirements;

• Automated the testing process to ensure daily Concur test files and receipts were generated and archived successfully;

• Built an automated solution to archive more than one year of historical data on an accelerated timeline;

• Implemented a daily interface to identify, extract, and archive expense details and imaged receipts for Italy;

• Developed and deployed a daily reconciliation process to verify accuracy and completeness of expense details and imaged receipts for the Italian office.

Acquis provided end-to-end implementation support, ranging from solutions design and configuration to implementation and deployment of the archiving solution.

Results

Combining strong technical and functional knowledge with broad skills across API, T&E, and SAP Concur, Acquis helped deliver the required solution on time, which allowed the client to comply with the new regulation and realize the tax benefits and savings.

In addition, because the solution is scalable and configurable, the client was able to leverage and deploy the archiving solution to other countries that have similar expense and receipt archiving regulatory requirements.