A Buyer’s Guide to Choosing a T&E Solution for Your Business

Your company is undoubtedly not alone in pursuit of efficiency, productivity, compliance, insights, resilience, and better ways to do business. And, amid many unknowns, making the business ready for change – good or bad – is critical.

Many finance and IT leaders see travel and expense management and solutions as a good place to more fully realize the benefits of streamlined and automated processes, including advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Nearly 4 in 5 decision-makers – 78% – say they’d like a single solution to handle their entire T&E process.¹

Deciding that the lack of integration, information, and efficient workflows might be holding the business back is a natural conclusion, but it brings you to another challenging step: Selecting a T&E management solution that fits your needs, delivers promised benefits, and is easily implemented and adopted.

Selecting a T&E Solution That’s Ready for Change

Read the travel and expense solution buyer’s guide for help choosing a system that’s right for your company today and in a future packed with unknowns.

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Our guide, How to Choose the Right Travel and Expense Solution, is designed to help you research and evaluate options on a T&E journey. It discusses the benefits of intelligent, automated solutions, covers features a company should expect, and provides key questions to ask of providers.

How a Business Benefits

An easy-to-use, intelligent T&E solution delivers greater compliance and other improvements across the business, allowing employees to focus on higher-value tasks.

Employees can book trips and submit expenses on the go while receiving in-app guidance that steers them to compliance.

Managers see trip and spending information in one place, providing pre-approvals before dollars go out the door.

Finance teams obtain a fuller picture of spending and cashflow, enabling faster decisions and adjustments as business requires.

IT teams can more readily unify data across different solutions and the business.

Features to Look For

A comprehensive, seamless solution can help improve spending visibility, boost efficiency of processes, clarify policies, and reduce user frustration.

Among the features the solution and the vendor should provide are:

• Support for integration with ERP, AP, HR, and other systems that help run your business. It should also include an array of partner solutions and services, from ride sharing to sustainability.
• Data security that features the latest protocols and fraud-finding capabilities.
• Intelligent automation, including AI and machine learning that provide real-time streaming data to ensure compliance and supply insights.
• Advanced payment methods so you can eliminate paper-based manual processes and cut the time spent processing reimbursements.
• Analytics that support advanced reporting and dashboards, so managers can track travel, spending, and sustainability measures.

Key Questions to Ask

With a better idea of what T&E management solutions should provide – and how that fits your company’s needs – you can start asking key questions to help narrow the list of possible providers.

Questions such as:

• How do you capture receipts and turn them into entries on an expense report? (and does that involve and machine learning)?
• Can expense reports be submitted, reviewed, and approved on the go from any device?
• Can it capture outside travel bookings?
• How much time does the solution take to implement?
• Will it evolve and grow with employee travel needs and preferences, including sustainability?
• What does your regular support entail and can we get extra help with some complex issues, because I know we’ll have them?

SAP Concur as Your T&E Platform

With SAP® Concur® solutions, a company can integrate its travel and expense processes and technology into a single platform. Organizations receive a near real-time view of spending that fosters compliance, better decisions, and the ability to scale and adapt policies and processes as priorities and the business environment shift. Read the Buyer’s Guide to learn more about how a platform ready for anything can make a business ready for change.  

1. Empower the Future of Work with Intelligent Travel and Expense Solutions, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of SAP Concur, May 2023