Control Spending With Less: How to Add Oversight Without Adding Overhead

If you had an army of people to watch over your army of employees, you could probably keep up with their spending. But you don’t, and it might just be a little cost prohibitive if you did.

So how do you stay on top of what’s going out the door? And we mean literally going out the door, since as much as 10% of your budget is T&E. Your employees have more power over spending decisions than ever before. And while that makes things easier for them, it makes your job that much more difficult.

The risk is real

When spending slips through corporate fingers, your risk of losing control goes up—you simply don’t know who’s spending what (or where or how) until the money’s already gone. This makes the risk of fraud harder to keep in check. Same goes for the risk of falling out of step with regulatory and/or internal compliance. And if you truly aren’t on top of T&E, the very safety of your travelers is also at risk.

With this much at stake, that army-of-people idea starts to sound pretty good.

Do you solve the problem with people, process or something simpler?

It comes down to this: You either need more bodies in place to review every reservation, transaction and receipt; or you need a system that provides oversight and makes compliance just another part of doing business.

The choice is clear.

• SAP Concur gives your employees simple, mobile tools that help write expense reports for your them—so you get accurate information on time (even early). This prevents data entry errors and delays that affect budget accruals and raise red flags in compliance reviews.
• SAP Concur automatically applies spending controls and targeted audit rules to every transaction, increasing policy compliance and decreasing fraud.
• Concur Audit uses objective experts to audit expense reports for you, based on both your internal policies and regulatory requirements. So you literally add oversight without adding overhead.

Take a look at the numbers.

Not only does SAP Concur show you the numbers behind the spending, giving you control over the spending, a recent IDC infographic gives you proof of performance.

After implementing SAP Concur solutions:

• 62% more employees followed company T&E policies
• There was a 67% reduction in the number of lost receipts
• Auditing staff was 28% more efficient
• Businesses saw an average of $672,000 in travel savings per year

Download the full IDC infographic and see how much you could save.