The Payment Innovations Transforming Spend Management

For businesses operating on thin margins, every purchase is a risk. Invoices and expense reports routed through accounts payable that don’t follow the necessary guidelines eliminate the most important aspects of spend management: insight and control. 

Fortunately, innovations in the payment space are changing this, accelerating the resolution of expenses and increasing the accuracy of data to create a more integrated, automated, and secure process.  

SAP Concur is redefining what is possible within spend management to create a better expense experience. Now, innovations like artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and virtual payments are bringing us closer to expense reports that practically write—and even review, approve, audit, and analyze—themselves.  

Expense Reports, Revolutionized 

Employees and finance teams alike dread expense reports: A past SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey found that nearly one out of four business travelers would rather have a cavity filled at the dentist than fill them out. Understandably, the process can be tedious and lengthy, especially when organizations rely on manual methods.  

But as finance decision-makers adapt to rising complexity in travel and expense (T&E), they must be quick to adopt new processes that can help them more effectively manage expense reports and overall spend. We’re elevating the Concur Expense experience to address these challenges.  

Powered by AI and optimized for mobile, employees can take photos of receipts for automatic entry, itemization, and categorization by sending them to Concur Expense through ExpenseIt. Concur Expense ensures the details—including the amount, date of the transaction, vendor, expense type, and location—are accurately captured and matched to the entry. Intelligent notifications can also flag missing receipts or when expense reports are ready for submission.  

Our partnership with Mastercard offers additional simplicity for both companies and employees. This integration captures and automatically populates purchases made on Mastercard corporate cards in Concur Expense. If more information is needed, users are notified immediately. This automated solution helps ensure compliance when processing expense reports, so they become one less thing for employees or organizations to think about.  

Accurate and Automated Spend Management 

When it comes to employee-initiated spend, manual solutions are never good enough. Automating your expense reclaim processes can speed up back-office functions, avoid errors, and track every expense—wherever and whenever it happens.  

Instead of manually analyzing the data to make informed guesses about budget amounts, Concur Expense captures spend at the source and offers visibility down to each detailed transaction. It tracks metrics that matter to deliver a clear look at real-time spend and a holistic way to monitor KPIs. This comprehensive view empowers key stakeholders with the information they need to understand and impact the bottom line.  

Best of all, employees are reimbursed faster and don’t have to sort through paper receipts. Smart-matching technology practically writes the expense report for them, combining credit card purchases, booked travel, and e-receipts to give finance leaders a unified view of T&E spend all in one.  

Looking ahead, generative AI has the potential to further streamline these processes. By providing data-backed recommendations that factor in patterns that a human may never even notice—such as the ideal time to book travel or the optimal dates to minimize travel costs—companies can use their resources more effectively. 

Seamless, Virtual Payment Options 

The pandemic undoubtedly accelerated the acceptance of digital payments for both point-of-sale and invoice-based methods. Now, as AI, automation, and virtual payments gain traction, this digitalization will only continue: The global virtual card market is expected to triple by 2030, according to Vantage Market Research.  

These virtual payment methods offer a transformative approach to financial operations. They erase the need to share sensitive credit card details with vendors or use the same card for all payments. Rather than use a company credit card, finance teams can generate unique virtual cards linked to existing credit cards, dispatching them instantly for greater cost control and visibility into spending.  

For businesses looking to leverage these tools, an SAP Concur integration with Extend, a leading virtual card platform, can help. Extend’s virtual card functionality is embedded into Concur Invoice as a payment option so businesses can pay invoices easily, quickly, and securely from a Concur Invoice workflow. There is no need for a new card, contract, or settlement process.  

This frees up finance teams to focus on exceptions instead of examining every charge. And because the reconciliation work is done automatically, it cuts valuable hours off end-of-month reporting. 

Implementing AI will only make these virtual payment methods more seamless moving forward. It can automatically trigger previously mentioned exceptions for review and perform audits to ensure across-the-board compliance. But most importantly, AI will help quickly validate payments as compliant and enable near-immediate reimbursement—addressing one of the most universal pain points of the expense process.  

What This Means for Your Business 

These payment innovations, and others, are helping businesses face the pervasive problems that come with manual spend management processes.  

With tools like AI and smart matching integrated into SAP Concur solutions, finance teams can finally get better visibility and control over spend across the entire organization—while providing an improved experience for employees tasked with filing the oft-dreaded expense report.   

Learn more about how SAP Concur solutions can transform your payment processes to deliver expense reports that practically write themselves.