By: PM-SAP Concur Implementer
SAP Concur manages and optimizes the company's T&E process through the Travel, Request, and Expense modules. In this article, we’ll share 6 recommendations and definitions that you should consider when implementing SAP Concur. These points not only will enrich the implementation in your company, but also will help you in reflecting your current travel process on your final configuration for your platform.
Analyze your approval process.
Reviewing your approval flow in advance will help you to have the right information on the quantity and type of levels your workflow needs. Also, consider if there are any rules that should apply to each approval level.
Some examples of roles in approval flow in SAP Concur are: approvers, who are often the immediate bosses, and processors, who are commonly the accounting team that validates expense information: accounts and tax indicators.
Likewise, there are different types of approval flows, you should keep in mind which of them will require:
Travel Request approval flow: Approval steps for travel reservations and expenses prior to the trip.
Expense Approval Flow: Steps for Expense reports approval
Cash advance approval flow: Cash advances can have their own approval steps on SAP Concur.
Cost object approval: You can also add to your workflows cost object approval so the travel request or expense report can go to the owner of the cost object if needed.
If your workflow currently consists of more than 3 approvals, it is very important to evaluate and simplify it to leave only the necessary roles. A simple workflow will allow the company an agile and smooth approval process.
Reflect your T&E Policy.
It is important to have the latest version of your Travel and Expense policy in order to analyze the configurations and audit rules that will be created. If your policy is not up to date, it is very important to cover this prior to the implementation.
The audit rules are configurations that will allow you to add limits on the amounts of spending, restrictions on the use of expense types, payment types, cities, among others. An audit rule has three points to define:
Who does it apply to?
Under which conditions it will be executed - for example: if a meal limit is $45 USD per day, the variables needed on your configuration will be the Expense types related to meals.
Exception type - if the user will be stopped from sending the report or if it will alert him and/or his approvers
With this configuration, you will have better management in your spending limits, since the expenses and requests will meet the conditions that were established based on your policy.
3. Prepare your Travel Agency and negotiations.
If you will be using the Travel module, it is very important to have a travel agency ready prior to the implementation of SAP Concur. Having a TMC (Travel Management Company) will provide the following benefits to the company:
Better administration and cost control
Preferential rates for hotel, flight and car rental
A better experience for the traveler
Pre-negotiate the rates to have discounts in hotel chains or travel airlines. With this, get ready so that in the SAP Concur configuration the preferential agreements rates can appear on the search results for the users.
SAP Concur TMC’s partners that can help you to provide value to travelers within the platform. Check with your executive to see what options you can work with.
4. Make accounting and tax administration efficient.
Have a clear and concise definition of your Expense types and then define the information for:
Forms and Fields: Shows the information that the employee will be filling out. Remember to add only relevant information for accounting or visibility.
Accounting Administration: Relate the accounting codes to the defined Expense Types.
Tax administration: Determine what VAT and tax indicators should be available for each expense type.
It is recommended to make an analysis to determine the expenses that will be being configured in SAP Concur since this determines the user experience as well as the correct accounting.
5. Automate corporate credit card transactions.
If in your company, credit cards are provided to travelers, keep in mind that SAP Concur offers the functionality of credit card feeds, which will integrate automatically the transactions of each user to SAP Concur.
With this, you will have better management of expenses and expense reports done in a timely manner.
If you want to achieve this connection, revise previously which credit cards are supported (most of them are) and get in contact with your bank and SAP Concur to revise these processes. Try to make this investigation prior to your implementation project or in an early phase to prevent delays in your implementation.
6. Learn SAP Concur concepts.
We recommend that your project team learns the SAP Concur concepts at the beginning, this will help them to have a better understanding throughout the project and thus adopt the new language that they will be using from now on.
Getting knowledge with these new terms will also help those who will remain as administrators of the tool since this team will work with the platform day by day.
These points can be guided through a specialized consultant. Axosnet offers a “Readiness Program” that focuses on highlighting these and other recommendations and with it, achieving the best configuration and adoption of your new travel expenses platform.