A Guide to Year-End Travel and Expense for SAP Concur Admins and Finance Teams

As the year winds down, SAP Concur admins and finance leaders are juggling two priorities: closing out expenses, invoices, and budgets for the year and ensuring the next year starts off on the right foot with better control, more efficiency, and less manual lift. Year-end is your best chance to examine how your systems, people, and policies are working, and where you can create long-term benefits.

1. Don’t Try to Do Everything

When the end of the year rolls around, the temptation for leaders to try to take on too much can create unnecessary drag on the business and your team. Instead, treat year-end like a pre-flight check. Identify what matters most across T&E, invoice workflows, policy compliance, and spend visibility — and prioritize what will have real business impact.
 

That means:

• Closing out open expense reports and invoice batches
• Addressing audit-rule exceptions that signal risk
• Identifying unsubmitted or noncompliant spend
• Reviewing budgets for over- or under-spend
• Checking that T&E policies still align with employee
  behaviors and organizational needs
• Determining which projects carry forward into 2026

This kind of clarity gives your team space to focus on meaningful improvements, not just maintenance.

2. Automate and Streamline Wherever You Can

If your team is still doing manual data entry, mileage tracking, or invoice routing, year-end is the ideal time to expand automation. Automated spend capture, built-in policy checks, and invoice workflows reduce errors and dramatically lighten the load during close.

Grace Swain of TCG Consulting put it best on SAP Concur Conversations:

“Start small … then grow your practice up to fully automated.”

At year-end, evaluate where automation is working, where it isn’t, and where you can scale next. This could include leveraging Intelligent Audit, expanding AP automation with Concur Invoice, or using Concur Travel to enforce policy at booking.

3. Refresh and Simplify T&E and Invoice Policies

Too many companies take a “set-it-and-forget-it” approach to their travel and expense policies, and consequently, their policies often fall out of sync with employee and business needs. Year-end is the perfect opportunity to review your policies to see if they have aged well. Spend patterns and behaviors change, business models shift, fraud tactics evolve, and many teams add new tools during the year. A year-end expense policy refresh ensures your policy reflects how your people actually work.

Simple, clear, and easy-to-find policies dramatically reduce errors, increase compliance, and make fiscal year-end easier.

Philipp Brunner, HR consultant at HR Campus says, "Simplify the process to make it as efficient as possible…[Employees want] to know what they should do and what they can do. And in order to do that, it should be as easy as possible."
 

For your annual policy update, take the following actions:

• Ensure policies are easy to find and understand
• Collect and consider employee feedback to make improvements to known pinch points
• Streamline required fields so users don’t get stuck
• Update thresholds, per diems, or mileage rules according to new regulations
• Adjust soft/hard stops based on risk trends
• Review approval chains for accuracy

Dermalogica’s Jenny Chen shared that their success came from rethinking the experience for employees:

“We were very intentionally creating scalable systems … taking a real long-term view …”
and“We wanted to make an impact without disrupting workflow.”

4. Go Paperless and Integrate Systems Before Problems Compound

Paper receipts, printed invoices, and manual approval flows create risk and slow everything down during year-end. Transitioning to digital workflows and ensuring your systems integrate cleanly gives you a single source of truth for spend.

Integrated travel, expense, and invoice data gives admins clearer visibility and cuts down on reconciliation time during both close and audits.

5. Use Spend Insights to Assess Budget Health and Plan for the New Year

Run reports comparing actuals to budget by category, cost center, and project. Identify underspend, overspend, or trends that signal where you need better controls. If you have leftover budget, avoid “use it or lose it” spending. Instead, channel it into strategic upgrades such as automation, policy consulting, auditing technology or services, or integrations.

If you need help identifying the right reports to pull, this tip sheet will get you started.

6. Know when to Bring in Expert Support

If the thought of reconfiguring your policy in the dead of night on December 31st isn’t appealing and you’d rather celebrate the New Year relaxing on the couch, we hear you. Year-end is a great time to bring in external specialists for configuration tuning, policy design, tax compliance, or VAT recovery. These partners can help you uncover savings, reduce risk, and prepare for regulatory changes without overloading your internal team.

The New Year Starts Now

How you close the year determines how smoothly the next one runs. By focusing on high-impact tasks, simplifying policies, expanding automation, and grounding decisions in spend data, SAP Concur admins and finance teams can start the year with cleaner books, faster workflows, and far fewer surprises.

Read here for more customer recommendations on overcoming this year’s challenges, join the discussion in the SAP Concur Community, or visit the admin hub for tips, tricks, updates, and everything you need to kickstart the New Year.