How SAP Concur Can Help You Better Manage Your Budgets

With so many new ways for employees to spend company money, budget owners need better visibility and control to understand how planned budgets are actually playing out. It’s not a simple task. Consider the many sources of spend that budget owners must track: travel booked with approved vendors and outside your system, expenses paid with credit cards and cash, invoices, and purchase requests. And data sources will only continue to grow as spend options expand.

Pulling all this historical and future spend data together from multiple sources can be labor intensive and error-prone. And if you miss some of the pieces of the spend puzzle, how can you make good spending decisions?

Some Strategies Create Unintended Consequences

To cope, some organizations try to enforce better management – with spending freezes or use-it-or-lose-it spending policies. But these heavy-handed tactics can just cause more headaches. Perhaps historical and planned spend will come in under budget, but what if you don’t have the visibility into the numbers to know for sure? If a spending freeze is put into place, the organization could underspend and lose opportunities to invest in growth.  Use-it-or-lose-it policies can cause end-of-quarter or end-of-fiscal-year panic, resulting in funds being spent in areas with a low return on investment.

Instead, to manage budgets accurately and efficiently, your organization needs a tool that provides broad visibility into spend through all channels, and automated budget alerts and controls triggered by that same system. By presetting limits in an easy-to-use system, budget owners are never caught off guard by over- or under-spend.

Budget, a new product from SAP Concur, provides budget owners the ability to see spend from multiple sources on one screen – even before spend has happened – and the tools to manage budgets efficiently. Integration with other products and data sources like Expense, Invoice, and Purchase Request gives budget owners the insights and control they need to properly manage their budgets – and with a lot less effort. Find out more about how Budget can help your budget owners gain the control they need.