SAP Concur is a software solution that helps companies manage their expenses, travel, and invoicing. It allows employees to submit expenses, receipts, and invoices through a mobile app or web portal, and then automates the approval and reimbursement process. Additionally, the software can integrate with a company’s accounting, travel booking, and purchasing systems to streamline the entire process.
SAP Concur is an online solution that focusses on the following areas:
- Travel
- Expenses
- Invoices
Here is an overview of the invoice solution first
Invoices are bills which a supplier gives to your company to request payment in exchange for goods and service. In earlier times this used to be done via paper invoices posted to your company’s address. Some suppliers still prefer the paper invoice method posted to your company. Others may chose to send their invoice via email as a PDF etc. Irrespective of how this invoice comes, the accounts payable process is not paperless in most companies. The Accounts Payable clerk needs to do a few checks and approvals on the received invoice before s/he can clear the invoice for payment. This process is done by some software (for example Concur or SAP Logistics Invoice Verification module). Some of the important checks that are done on invoices are basic checks like
- Whether the supplier is a valid supplier and is registered with the company
- Whether the goods / services provided have a Purchase Order to match
- Whether this is a duplicate invoice and is merely sent twice.
To carry out these checks in a fast manner this data must be in digital format and should be converted from a paper-based invoice/ or email based one to an Invoice document in Concur. Paper invoices are scanned by an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) solution and the data is used to create an invoice document and given a Batch ID. If it is an email invoice, concur analysts manually create the invoice document and this also gets a batch id.
After that each invoice goes through a series of audit which are levels of verification, and either gets Approved or Rejected. These can be viewed in the software along with details of why they were rejected/approved.
Once approved, the invoices can be directly paid via Concur or they can be sent to another ERP like SAP ECC via interface payment.
Travel & Expense: If you are an employee who needs to book a business travel, you may have raised a request with your company’s travel team. Your interaction with the team could be in the level that you book all your tickets, stays etc and then submit your bills for claims. These claims are then checked by the team to see if they fall within the policy and if approved, they are cleared for payment.
Another way is that the travel team provides with options of tickets and stays which you chose and does the booking for you. The second option pre-validates the options based on the company policy and then provided to you .
Your company’s T&E would use some software to do these activities. SAP Concur T&E solution is an industry standard online solution to manage your trips and trip expenses by already setting a network of pre-approved providers (mostly in travel and hospitality space), configured to match your company’s policies on travel and expenses :
- In some countries alcohol expenses cannot be claimed, whereas in others they are.
- Also based on your designation, you may select business class flights or economy class
- If your travel is for more than N number of days, you can stay at a more comfortable hotel rather than a one-night stay Bed & Breakfast.
All these policies can be configured in SAP Concur, so that when you book your travel via Concur, you do not have to worry what you can do or cannot do. Also, your company has higher visibility on their spends with great analytical capabilities.