Three SAP Concur Expense Report Optimizations to Improve Productivity 

As financial leaders prepare for 2025, efficiency and transparency remain key organizational priorities, particularly in expense management. Joe Ng, Principal, and Srivatsan Sampath, Senior Solutions Architect, offer insights on leveraging Concur expense reporting to enhance productivity and visibility.

1. Identify trends through user behavior

By focusing on user behavior across key roles — approvers, employees, and back-office staff — businesses can identify trends and uncover inefficiencies within their processes. These data patterns allow financial leaders to address critical questions such as:

How long does it take to approve an expense? Are there inefficiencies in the expense review process? Are employees traveling more or less than in previous periods? Do these trends influence internal policies? What processes can be automated?

Insights derived from user behavior evaluation may also highlight the need for a third-party platform that integrates with SAP Concur expense reporting to automate processes such as spend monitoring, risk management, and compliance tracking through artificial intelligence (AI).

2. Leverage data consolidation platforms to see the full picture

The Concur platform provides powerful, valuable T&E insights as part of a macro view into financial spending. Tools like Snowflake, Tableau, or Power BI consolidate all relevant data points into one report enabling complete visibility. These platforms offer advanced data analysis and visualization capabilities, allowing businesses to leverage AI for deeper insights. Integrating these tools enhances report quality and delivers a more dynamic, interactive experience that ultimately enables a more complete and insightful narrative of the data.

3. Create custom reports that highlight key performance indicators (KPIs)

The SAP Concur custom reporting capability empowers financial leaders to effectively communicate and track KPIs. By tailoring reports to align with specific business objectives, stakeholders have clear visibility into T&E initiatives and can make informed, performance-driven decisions. Custom reports can be designed to track expenses, ROI, compliance and policy adherence, vendor spend management, and other critical metrics. Even minor optimizations to existing reports can provide a clearer understanding of how internal initiatives align with KPIs.

Concur expense reporting: preparing for 2025

By focusing on user behavior, identifying opportunities for automation, leveraging data consolidation platforms, and creating custom reports around KPIs, financial leaders can uncover the critical elements within T&E reporting data that drive organizational success. Implementing these optimizations will help to streamline processes, enhance productivity, maintain transparency, and set the foundation for a lucrative outset in 2025.

As a trusted advisor to hundreds of SAP Concur clients around the globe, Acquis Consulting Group has helped organizations define and strengthen their T&E programs in over 100 countries. Our consultants are global consulting experts in strategy and implementation for expense, travel, invoice, and payments. To learn more about Acquis’ partnership with SAP Concur, click here.