The Connection Between Intelligent T&E Automation and Better Compliance

Refining your travel and expense processes (T&E) with intelligently automated and digitized processes is a natural step in digitally transforming your finance function. Some of the benefits are obvious: less paper to wrangle, less data to type up, fewer data entry errors, and no more nagging reminders to manually email each month. Your organization’s expense data becomes timelier and more trustworthy as employees’ expense reports almost write themselves with mobile receipt capture and e-receipt processing – so finance staff can focus on bigger fish to fry.

Two of those very big fish that sometimes get left behind when there’s too much manual work to manage are: controls and compliance.

Spend matters: It’s where fraud and misappropriation of funds can hide

Miscategorized spend can cause budget, tax, and compliance issues. Business travel itineraries and employee spend inform and uphold duty of care standards, so you can take care of your employees when they’re traveling. And if they travel internationally, steering clear of anti-bribery penalties — up to $2 million in fines for each violation — is vital and requires a hyper-vigilant eye on foreign travel spend.

It’s also critical that expenses are well-documented and accurate and have a strong audit trail. For example, the SAP Concur and Oversight Spend Insights Report 2021 found that excessive missing receipts were up 58.6%, and expense header keyword match violations were up 26.7% over 2020. In addition, duplicate mileage submissions leapt 2,127% from Q3 to Q4 2021.

Finally, many organizations are enacting more spend control and tightening budgets so they can focus more funds on growth and resilience initiatives.

Integral to keeping tight control over the money your employees spend is to bring simplicity and intelligence to every spending moment. This provides the comfort of knowing that employees are being guided to the right decisions with built-in controls and assistance, that you’re minimizing the risk of fraud and noncompliance, and that business funds are being spent prudently.

The power of automated T&E controls

By incorporating controls into expense reporting and approvals processes, employees can make better decisions in the moment, such as avoiding noncompliant spend or quickly snapping a photo of a receipt so that documentation isn’t lost.

Via customizable controls that support your organization’s specific rules and regulatory compliance requirements and intelligent analysis, your system can:

• Require manager preapprovals for certain types of spend.
• Steer employees to preferred vendors.
• Include helpful reminders to guide employees on how to categorize charges.
• Capture travel booked outside of your system to help you perform duty of care.

Intelligent automation lends a huge helping hand. As expenses are captured, intelligently automated T&E can use AI to flag questionable spend based on your policies, missing receipts, and other flags, and kick exceptions up to human reviewers, relieving your AP staff from auditing every expense. It can parse out and track spend that’s considered taxable employee benefits (TEB), like home office supplies or furniture, as well as help you control VAT/GSM reclaim to get all that is due back to your organization. You can also set up dashboards to alert you to unusual spend patterns, such as a large jump in a particular category.

Staying on top of change

With centralized controls and digitized processes, it’s easy to keep employees informed of spend rules and processes that shift due to updated policies, new regulatory or tax requirements, or changes to the business. Staff will no longer show up with out-of-policy spend jotted down on last year’s out-of-date expense form. Instead, you can update controls across your T&E solution and add alerts to inform employees of changes.

With automated T&E, you can gain control over spend in so many more ways than just the amount of dollars being spent. Intelligent, automated tools enable you to prevent, catch, and remediate issues that get lost or buried in more manual processes or less intelligent solutions.

To learn more about how SAP Concur can help your organization gain and stay in control of spend, read our tip sheet.