Navigating the Path to Expansion with SAP Concur Solutions

Business expansion offers many exciting opportunities to deliver positive financial impact. 

And whether you're exploring or actively embracing it in your strategy, SAP Concur is a scalable solution that can accommodate expanding business needs and handle business spend across multiple regions.      

Navigating the complexities of expansion is crucial to maintaining financial health and driving sustainable success. As an SAP® Concur® customer, you're already perfectly positioned to make the maximum gains as you extend your reach.  

Expansion comes in many forms, from acquiring or merging with other companies (31%), opening a new location domestically (35%) or expanding internationally (30%).1 Whichever route you are taking, there are specific best practices and spend management solutions that will ensure your company’s continued success. 

In this blog, we’ll explore the two stages of expansion — exploring and embracing      — and discover how by leveraging your SAP Concur solutions across your organization, you can enhance efficiency, ensure compliance and drive future growth. 

1. Navigate Expansion as You Explore Opportunities 
2. Navigate Expansion as You Embrace Strategies 

Let’s look at the two stages of business expansion and learn how a holistic approach to spend management can help you reach your business potential. 

1. Navigate Expansion as You Explore Opportunities 

If expansion is under consideration for your business and you’re exploring possible opportunities, there’s good news. At this stage, you have a clear chance to establish scalable, consolidated financial processes that will adapt effortlessly as you turn your ideas into plans.  

An integrated end-to-end spend management solution will scale and adapt with you, ensuring seamless spend data flows across all entities as finance teams manage different currencies, languages and cross-border tax regulations. This means that as you expand, you enhance productivity and profitability and reduce risk and non-compliance.                                       

Here are some of the ways SAP Concur solutions will support you in the early, planning stages of expansion and as you build on that success in the future. 

Time to Innovate 

Your best people should be focused on strategic and innovative work – not undertaking time-consuming manual financial tasks.  

By rolling out Concur Expense and Concur Travel to every corner of your expanding organization, you will quickly gain valuable business spend insights that will help you reach your goals faster. You’ll also have a head start on competitors who decide to stick with disparate financial systems that don’t talk to each other. 

WW T&E users of SAP Concur solutions reported 148 estimated hours saved by finance/AP teams per week.2 

Automate Vendor Payments and Invoicing 

Don't just stop at expanding your T&E solutions. Automate all your business spend, including vendor payments and invoicing. A centralized Accounts Payable process will unlock cost savings and ensure healthy cash flow management across territories. Concur Invoice enables you to get ahead of vendor spending, reduce the risk of fraud and capture data to make better business decisions. 

38% of businesses worldwide say faster processing/payment times is a top benefit of an automated vendor invoice management solution.3 

Accurate Spend Data – Everywhere 

Ensure that business spend data will flow seamlessly between regions and countries and be localized to drive accuracy and compliance. SAP Concur solutions increase spend visibility and control, regardless of location.  

Budget allows you to effortlessly capture and consolidate data for a holistic view of employee spending throughout your business, no matter where they are based. This gives you the ability to adapt budgets to meet evolving business requirements as your expansion plans are put into action. 
 

73% say that access to near real-time data and analytics will help them achieve strategic goals.4 

Regional Compliance 

Each country has its own set of complex tax laws and regulations which, if not properly managed, can result in considerable amounts of money being left on the table. With the increasing implementation of indirect taxes such as VAT (Value Added Taxes), worldwide manual processes will soon become inefficient, ineffective and costly due to country-specific and constantly changing regulations.  

Concur Tax Assurance by Blue dot helps you comply with global tax regulations by optimizing the integrity of your data, protecting against audits and penalties. With visibility into reclaimable VAT, you can maximize profitability and reallocate savings to the areas of business that need it the most. 

26% of businesses worldwide saw an increase in tax reclaim (e.g., VAT, GST (Goods and Services Taxes)) savings through SAP Concur solutions or SAP Concur partners.5 

Sustainable Travel 

Be ready for the possibility that employees might be traveling further and more frequently. How can you ensure they are booking the most cost-effective air fares and are safe when traveling to new destinations?  

With Concur Travel employees can pre-plan their trips and benefit from optimized air fares and more sustainable choices. By centralizing the travel booking process you can gain increased visibility for Duty of Care and compliance purposes. 

Where Next? 

Once you’ve decided that expansion is the next step for your business, you’ll probably have many more questions about how to proceed and what exactly you need to do to maximize success.  

Check out our Exploring Expansion: Best Practice Tips for Unlocking Your Potential tipsheet for six specific examples of what best practice spend management looks like and the solutions that help businesses achieve this. 

2. Navigate Expansion as You Embed Strategies 

If your expansion plans are already underway and you want to stay on track, it's time to focus on embedding these strategies across all your spend management functions.  

At this stage, data-driven decisions and robust reporting become the catalyst for scalable expansion and ongoing success. Localization of tax requirements, automated compliance checks and real-time reporting are crucial to ensuring that future rollouts go according to plan. 

Here are some of the ways SAP Concur will support you in reaching your full potential as you expand. 

Enhance Risk Detection 

Empower finance managers to effortlessly consolidate and manage cashflow across multiple entities to reduce costs, ensure compliance and reduce fraud. You can utilize Concur Detect by Oversight to identify patterns of erroneous behavior and high-risk spend. Using AI and machine learning, it analyzes expenses pre-and/or post-payment to identify errors, waste, patterns of misuse and fraud that would be difficult, if not impossible, to spot by human detection. 

Built-in Audits and Policy-Adherence 

Best practice global spend management ensures local audit and policy rules are built into your financial processes. 

Intelligent Audit helps fuel business momentum by automatically evaluating your processes and proactively identifying and addressing issues before they inflict harm on your financial performance or result in non-compliance.  

By automating policy enforcement, generating robust reports and facilitating audits, you can ensure adherence to regulations and maintain accurate financial records as you expand, saving time and money. 

42% found non-compliance resulting in time wasted during expense audits was the biggest risk/compliance related challenges of not using a dedicated T&E and/or invoice management automation software. 

Robust Reporting for Localized Spend Control 

With the right spend information (localized for language, currency and policy) at the right time, SAP Concur solutions empower you to make informed decisions with consistent data in the form of reports and dashboards.  

Consultative Intelligence combines the human expertise of our consultants with our AI-driven technology. This provides you with more accurate, meaningful spend data for ongoing improvements and refinements to spending behavior and compliance. 

69% of companies worldwide believe T&E has improved their ability to make data-driven decisions.6 

Drive Adoption Across Your Business 

Adopting new technologies doesn't have to be challenging. Drive adoption, ensure policy compliance, streamline processes, boost productivity and enhance end user engagement with Concur User Assistant by WalkMe. Your employees gain access to valuable, easy-to-follow, local language training content seamlessly integrated within the SAP Concur user interface, making user engagement easier and maximizing your business's return on investment as quickly as possible. 

The SAP Concur platform also incorporates multilingual and localized formats and templates, allowing for accurate spend control and a stress-free employee experience.  

By 2025, 70% of organizations will use digital adoption solutions across the entire technology stack to overcome still insufficient application user experiences.7 

You’re Not Alone – Help Is At Hand 

As you continue to extend your SAP Concur solutions your requirements will evolve.  

You might need to configure your existing SAP Concur solutions or add new tools to your suite. It might be that you’re not fully utilizing all the features and you want help in optimizing your spend management solution.  

A comprehensive change management program, comprehensive support options and a community of more than 90,000 users helps create a seamless rollout of your spend management solution. In addition, the multilingual and localized formats and templates make the user experience stress-free. 

Where Next? 

As your business expands, so will your business spending habits. It’s crucial to ensure you’re maximizing your spend management platform and that you’ve got all the necessary tools to oversee expansion in all offices and countries. 

Work through our practical Embracing Expansion: A Checklist to Successfully Reach Your Full Potential to see how eight key challenges can transform into opportunities for successful expansion. 

SAP Concur Solutions: Your Ticket to Success 

For optimal spend visibility and control, scalable SAP Concur solutions simplify financial operations, streamline processes, reduce manual data entry and enhance data-driven decisions. On the compliance side, SAP Concur automates compliance checks and provides comprehensive audit trails to ensure efficiency and mitigate risks.  

For further insight into the common questions Finance Managers ask during discussions about business expansion, and the solutions to overcome them, read our Is Your Spending Keeping Up with Your Business – or Vice-Versa eBook. 

Alternatively, for further help and support you can contact your Account Executive.