Choosing a Business Travel and Expense Software: Examples and Best Practices

Manual and tedious processes waste energy across such essential business tasks as booking trips, compiling expense reports, handling invoices, and making payments and expense reimbursements. The processes duplicate work and weaken data, analysis, and control. Since travel and expense (T&E) and accounts payable (AP) are naturally connected, many businesses realize their technology platforms should be, too. But moving from logical conclusion to choosing the right business travel and expense software requires understanding key features and best practices.

You’ll need a solution that can deepen insights, accelerate workflows, strengthen compliance, improve employee experience, and deliver bottom-line benefits such as early-pay discounts and better rates. And you’ll want to be able to measure the benefits. Take, for example, the measurable gains from SAP Concur integrated solutions:

• 2X faster expense reporting
• 19.2% less time booking trips
• 35% more invoices processed
• 21% average savings in booking and expense reporting

To help you navigate the process of choosing a travel and expense software that meets your needs, this blog post will explore:

• Key travel and expense software features to look for (and what to avoid) from a business-focused solutions provider.
• Real examples, like how the global Campari Group gained consistency, efficiency, visibility, and scalability with SAP Concur solutions.
• Why it’s important that the solutions are easy to set up and deliver benefits quickly through seamless integration, implementation, adoption tools, and ongoing support.

What should I look for in a travel and expense software?

Efficiency, clarity, and control are reasons driving businesses to automate expense management. Perhaps nothing is more important than having travel and expense software with the flexibility to meet future needs. Nobody wants technology that’s obsolete right out of the gate, so let’s consider key features to look for and why.

Expense and travel solutions working together are a powerful combination for multiple reasons, with benefits that grow when AP joins the fold. At the core, organizations should seek solutions from a provider committed to continuous innovation across the breadth of travel and expense software and AP automation, because  selling promises isn’t the same as keeping them.

Achieve true integration

A system designed as one is better than two or three patched together with weak connectors and manual data links. With true integration with your ERP and other systems, data moves smoothly, quickly, and transparently from travel to expense to AP functions. This enables complete visibility among travel managers and finance stakeholders, while employees enjoy a better user experience as they move between tasks without being required to jump between multiple logins and platforms.

Expect future-ready tech

A travel and expense software must scale with business expansion. It should have built-in payment options, extensions and apps for tax management and other needs, options to choose travel partners, operability across borders and currencies, and a record of supporting large – and smaller – numbers of users, trips, and expense reports.

Be all in on travel

Some business travel “solutions” are loosely connected to expense software, an inadequate approach as preferences, content, and everything else in travel continues to shift. Make sure your provider has established relationships with TMCs and suppliers of all types and can capture supplier-direct booking, which ensures compliance, negotiated rates, and visibility. Diverse air, hotel, rail, and car rental options and new content channels should be a given. You should gain control and savings; travelers should gain information, personalization, and satisfaction.

Embrace AI-powered travel, expense and AP excellence

Your travel, expense, and AP solutions should use AI technologies to examine every expense, detect and deter fraud, enforce compliance, easily configure rules, spot spending patterns, capture and read wide varieties of invoices, correct mistakes and omissions, and deliver visibility. For nearly a decade,

SAP Concur has built and implemented powerful solutions using AI and machine learning (ML) to help organizations achieve greater efficiency and compliance.

See a complete view of your spending

System and data integrations provide a real-time, full view of spending before, during, and after it occurs. Intelligent reports and dashboards built on best practices should be standard, with the capability to customize based on your KPIs and the assistance of reporting specialists. Budget views should be tailored to owner needs; reports should not only track business expenses but also sustainability impact and other strategic priorities. With the right intelligence, you’ll gain access to insights that enable you to make the best forecasts, choices, and decisions for your business.

Travel, expense, and business flow smoothly for Campari

Starting with its namesake liqueur, Campari Group has grown into 190-plus markets and over 50 brands, including Wild Turkey whiskey and SKYY vodka. Business expansion and acquisitions threw together many different disconnected and time-consuming T&E processes and complicated business for the global group and its 4,700-plus employees – “Camparistas.”

Seeking consistency and efficiency, Campari Group pursued digitized travel and expense software and a provider that could remedy:

• Inconsistent business travel management across markets
• Manual, paper-based processes for tracking and reimbursing business expenses that travelers and other employees found cumbersome
• Offline bookings that obscured data and trip visibility
• Inadequate cost control and inconsistent travel content

Campari chose to partner with SAP Concur for its travel and expense software. They laid the foundation with Concur Expense in 2017 and began to automate expense management. In 2020, the company added Concur Travel. Along the way, they developed a mantra – one policy, one agency, one tool that can grow and adapt as the company does. With the integration, they obtained reliable data, trip and spending visibility, improved reporting, expanded duty of care tools, and simplified approvals for managers.

The centralized business travel and expense system rolled out across regions and time zones, delivering benefits detailed in a video and case study:

• 50% faster trip approvals
• 13% fewer expense report rejections
• 70% reduction in offline travel agency fees

“Our mission is to streamline the travel experience, guarantee safety and security for employees while fostering a sustainable travel culture,” says William Cocco, Global Travel Manager. “With SAP Concur solutions, we are able to integrate partners that help us with the duty of care to offer travelers all the tools to travel safely.”

Deploying your travel, expense, and AP solutions

Once you identify a travel and expense software to move business forward faster, you should expect help at every turn to support implementation, adoption, and ongoing operations. SAP Concur has that covered. Having worked with over 46,000 organizations around the globe, if we haven’t seen it all, we’re darn close to it.

Businesses and IT teams rightfully worry about whether new solutions will integrate with current systems and if they’ll have the resources to set everything up and start earning returns. Whether an IT team of one or many, we provide options, features, and support  for deploying and integrating travel and expense software:

• Multiple integration methods including on-demand, secure file transfer protocol (sFTP), web services, and pre-built connectors. The variety – and ability to customize – is designed to mesh with your current systems and how you do business.
• An easy-to-use setup wizard enables selection of financial details to post, reporting fields, compliance controls, and integrations with ERPs and other systems.
• Data security is paramount. Solutions meet or exceed international security, privacy, and compliance guidelines, and we ensure data is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Cloud-based solutions are accessed via a single sign-on by web and mobile, with extensive user ID and authentication control.
• Testing and evaluating ensure your company gets the information, reports, compliance, and process improvements it needs from the travel, expense and AP automation.
• Extensive ecosystem of over 700 SAP Concur partners offering apps, integrations, and services from payment providers, travel suppliers, sustainability experts, and others that extend and customize our expense management automation and business travel solutions.
• User training and support for employees and system administrators. Employees receive answers 24/7 and in multiple languages through in-app guidance and chat help. We provide turnkey tools, emails, checklists, and other resources to build adoption and conserve IT’s time. SAP Concur offers webinars and other ongoing education resources, including an online community of users and thought leaders.

Why SAP Concur Is the Right Spend Management Solution

A unified platform that offers AI innovation, spend visibility, scalability, and end-to-end support make us the leading travel, expense, and AP partner.

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Conclusion

When choosing a solution for tracking business expenses, automating AP, and booking corporate travel, it’s critical to determine whether a vendor has the technology and commitment to keep promises. SAP Concur offers the capabilities, resources, and innovation to help you reduce manual work, streamline processes, and make travel and expense practically run themselves.

Customers attest to SAP Concur meeting their needs:

• 93% of users would recommend SAP Concur to a friend or colleague on GetApp.
• 83% of SAP Concur users give our solutions 4 or 5 stars on G2.

Success stories from real organizations and satisfied customers can also be invaluable when evaluating your travel and expense options. “Employees at Tungsten Automation are happier and more productive,” says Lori Ceccanese, Manager of Accounts Payable, Tungsten Automation. “They spend less time fussing with their expenses and more time doing their jobs.”