Reclaiming Time: How One T&E Admin Uses Verify to Automate Expense Audits

Stephanie Richards has spent over a decade working with SAP Concur. She knows what a well-oiled machine looks like, and she also knows exactly what it costs when the system isn’t doing enough of the heavy lifting.

As the T&E Administrator for Group 1001, an insurance holding company growing fast across the Midwest and into international markets, Stephanie manages expense reporting for roughly 1,500 employees. She sat down with us at Fusion 2026, where she had just finished implementing Verify, SAP Concur's self-serve audit solution that automatically checks 100% of expense reports for compliance issues, and here are some of her insights.

The Manual Audit Challenge at Group 1001 

Before Verify, Stephanie reviewed 100% of expense reports herself. Every receipt. Every line item. Every submission from every one of those 1,500 employees. 

On a normal week, that would take Stephanie 40 hours. During peak periods, like the company’s annual sales meeting or year-end, it pushed past 50 hours a week.

“It was just a lot and took a lot of time. I was hoping to get my position down to part-time so I could focus on other finance things.” 

- Stephanie Richards, Group 1001 

That’s just what 1,500 employees generating expense reports looks like when the audit process is entirely manual. Something had to change. 

Why Group 1001 choose SAP Concur Verify 

Stephanie first heard about Verify at Fusion the previous year and her reaction was immediate. 

"I didn't realize we needed Verify until I came to the conference last year and it was an option and I said, 'We've got to have that. We must have it.'" 

She came back this year with a plan: implement Verify on-site, while she still had support around her. 

"I wanted to implement Verify while I was here, so if I had any issues, I had resources to help me out with that." 

Two days in, she was already seeing results. 

“Verify already has freed me up a lot of time, and it’s only been implemented for two days.” 

- Stephanie Richards, Group 1001 

What Verify catches:  

• wrong dates 

• incorrect amounts 

• illegible receipts 

• and in a few cases already, AI-generated fraudulent receipts 

Instead of Stephanie manually scanning every submission for these issues, the system flags them automatically. She reviews what needs attention and moves on. 

Her target? Cut 15 hours a week off her audit workload. Given what Stephanie saw in just the first two days, she thinks that’s a realistic floor, not a ceiling.

How Expense Audit Automation Saves Admins Time 

Stephanie has a bachelor’s in accounting. When she joined Group 1001 about a year and a half ago, she made a deliberate shift into finance and T&E administration. She loves the work, especially the relationships she’s built with people across the company. But she’s also clear-eyed about where she wants to go. 

The time Verify frees up isn’t going to sit idle. She’s planning to move deeper into budgeting and forecasting, which is where her accounting background and her access to Intelligence reporting start to combine into something genuinely useful for the business.

“Because you have the knowledge of Concur, not a lot of people do. Knowing the ins and outs of it really helps if you want to move somewhere. Definitely a plus on the resume.” 

- Stephanie Richards, Group 1001 

That framing matters for anyone managing their career as a Concur admin. The platform keeps expanding, and so does the skill set that comes with really knowing it. 

How Group 1001 Uses ExpenseIt and Intelligence 

Stephanie is an open advocate for ExpenseIt among her travelers. Her pitch is straightforward: it reads the receipt, itemizes it, and takes the manual work out of building the report.  

On the reporting side, she’s been using Concur Intelligence to pull monthly spend by cost center and to track top spenders across the sales and marketing teams. Finance leadership uses those reports to validate that spend is appropriate and to inform their future planning. She’s now starting to look at automating the monthly report distribution so it goes out without her having to touch it. 

Looking further out, she’s watching the AI-powered Joule integration closely. Group 1001 is also in the process of rolling out a revised T&E policy, and her hope is that Joule will let employees simply ask what the policy allows rather than hunting through a document or guessing. The company is also moving ghost cards from AP into Concur, and she wants to make sure the Joule rollout aligns with that transition once IT signs off on security.

What an Admin Should Look for in T&E Tools 

Stephanie hasn’t spent much time evaluating competitors. Her view is simple: Concur is the most established platform in this space, and once you know it well, that knowledge travels with you. 

If someone asked Stephanie what to prioritize in any T&E solution, her answer is clear:  

1. Automation 

2. Customization 

What she values most is the ability to build audit rules, the flexibility to configure the system to match specific policy requirements, and the freedom to let the system handle the routine work in the background.  

“My favorite thing about Concur is the mobile app. End users can create reports on the go, and as an administrator, I can review and process expense reports from anywhere too.” 

- Stephanie Richards, Group 1001 

What Other Insurance T&E Teams Can Learn from Group 1001 

For many insurance organizations, expense management becomes more complex as the business grows. Expanding sales teams, distributed employees, acquisitions, and evolving compliance requirements can quickly turn expense auditing into a full-time job. 

Group 1001's experience highlights a challenge many T&E teams face: highly skilled administrators often spend the majority of their time reviewing routine transactions instead of focusing on strategic finance initiatives. By automating expense audits with Verify, Stephanie was able to shift from reviewing every report manually to focusing only on exceptions that require attention. 

The takeaway for other insurance organizations is clear: automation is not just about reducing workload. It creates capacity. Capacity to improve reporting, support budgeting and forecasting, strengthen policy compliance, and contribute more strategically to the business. As expense volumes continue to grow, the most effective T&E programs will be the ones that allow technology to handle repetitive tasks while administrators focus on driving greater value across the organization.