How Meteor Education Manages T&E for 350 Employees with SAP Concur

Rebecca Kelley’s title at Meteor Education is Travel and Expense Analyst, but the description barely scratches the surface. She administers the full SAP Concur program, manages policy, oversees compliance, processes expense reports, and handles training for every new employee who comes through the door. She has worked with Concur since 2012 and has made it her mission at each company she has joined to become the person who knows the system inside and out. 

We spoke with Rebecca at Fusion 2026 about how she manages a diverse traveler base, the impact Verify has had on her day-to-day, and what she would look for in any travel and expense platform if she were starting from scratch today.

Managing a mixed traveler base with one integrated T&E platform 

Meteor Education has approximately 350 employees, and roughly a third of them travel regularly—sales representatives, field installers, and various other roles that keep people on the road throughout the week. Another third travels occasionally, and the rest only rarely. 

Managing that range of traveler types, and doing it efficiently, is where the value of an integrated platform becomes clear. For Rebecca, the ability to consolidate travel booking, card feeds, and expense reporting into one system is not a nice-to-have.

“It’s a one-stop shop. They’re going to one place to do all of their travel, and then linking that into expense. They’re not having to use multiple apps or multiple tools.” 

- Rebecca Kelley, Travel and expense analyst, Meteor Education

The integration with their TMC partner and corporate card feed means employees are not manually entering transaction data or juggling separate systems. Policy is enforced within the booking process itself, which keeps the right choices visible without requiring extra steps from travelers. 

How SAP Concur Verify automated expense audit and saved hours weekly

Before Verify, Rebecca was reviewing every expense line by line, pulling up each receipt manually, and checking for compliance issues one report at a time. For a program with regular travelers submitting reports that might include ten, fifteen, or twenty individual expenses, that added up quickly. 

After about a year with Verify, that workflow looks very different. The tool handles the first pass on every report, flagging exceptions so Rebecca only needs to act when something actually requires attention. Reports with no issues move through without taking up her time.

“Verify has made my life so much easier. In the past I was looking at every single expense and every single receipt. Now I’m just looking at the exceptions.” 

- Rebecca Kelley, Travel and expense analyst, Meteor Education

The time savings have also changed how Rebecca spends her day. Instead of moving through a queue of receipts, she now spends more time supporting travelers, digging into reporting, and improving the program proactively.  

The benefits extend beyond Rebecca’s workload. Because Verify catches issues before a report goes to a manager for approval, approvers are spending less time scrutinizing line items that have already been reviewed. Compliance problems get resolved earlier in the process, with less friction for everyone involved. The data from Verify has also helped Rebecca identify patterns that led to concrete policy updates earlier this year, a direct connection between what the system surfaces and how the program is managed. 

How expense data visibility eliminated a 30% travel budget overrun 

When Rebecca joined Meteor Education two and a half years ago, no travel and expense reporting was being done. Her title reflects the gap she was hired to fill. The management team had been working from a bottom-line budget view without any visibility into the data behind it. 

Pulling granular reporting out of Concur and presenting it to leadership for the first time was, in her words, extremely impactful. Before that visibility, Meteor Education was running 25 to 30 percent over budget on travel every year. After Rebecca started surfacing the data and the team began making adjustments in response to it, the company came in on budget for the first time in 2024 and stayed there through 2025.

“Prior to my joining, the company was 25 to 30% over budget every year in travel. After we started pulling the data and making shifts based on what we were seeing, we were actually on budget for the first time in 2024 and 2025.” 

- Rebecca Kelley, Travel and expense analyst, Meteor Education

The changes that drove those results were not dramatic. The data identified spending outliers who needed additional training, gave managers visibility beyond top-line budgets so conversations about spend were grounded in specific, and identified where policy could be tightened based on actual traveler behavior. 

SAP Concur onboarding: how Meteor Education trains new hires and acquired teams 

Meteor Education completes one to two acquisitions each year. So far, none of the acquired companies have been using Concur, which means new employees often arrive from highly manual expense environments. Rebecca builds Concur into the onboarding process from the very first day. Every new employee gets a walkthrough that covers the ExpenseIt app, how to forward receipts by email, how electronic receipts work, and what to do if a receipt goes missing.  

Rebecca says onboarding to Concur goes consistently smoothly and employees appreciate the simplicity of a more automated expense process.  

The most common ongoing question Rebecca handles, regardless of tenure, is what to do when a receipt is lost. She gets it weekly, sends a reference document regularly, and has made peace with the fact that some things require consistent reinforcement. Concur’s missing receipt declaration feature provides the solution; helping employees remember to use it is simply part of the job.

AI capabilities that reduce friction for travelers and admins alike 

When Rebecca thinks about what makes SAP Concur worth using, AI sits near the top of the list. The improvement that has made the biggest practical difference so far is hotel itemization, a feature that handles the breakdown of hotel folios automatically rather than leaving employees to work through it themselves. It removed a category of issue that used to find its way to Rebecca’s desk regularly. 

Looking ahead, Meteor Education is in the process of implementing Joule, Concur’s AI-powered assistant, and Rebecca is watching the admin dashboard in particular. She has also had a sneak peek at the updates coming to the expense experience and is looking forward to what those changes will mean for her travelers. 

Her broader view on AI in T&E is practical: the more that can be automated before an employee opens a report, the less work that report requires.  

“As long as you know how to use it efficiently, expense reports really just write themselves if you let it. That’s my favorite part about Concur — saving time for employees, which in turn saves the company money.”

- Rebecca Kelley, Travel and expense analyst, Meteor Education

Must-have features in a travel and expense management platform 

When Rebecca’s leadership team recently looked at a competitor’s offering, real-time card notifications were the feature that caught their attention. Rebecca was able to go back to them with a straightforward response: Concur already does that. The capability was there; it just needed to be activated. For her, that moment illustrated something broader about the platform, there is often more built into the system than organizations are currently using. 

If she were evaluating a travel and expense platform from scratch today, her non-negotiables would be: 

• Strong AI and automation capabilities, particularly for receipt capture, expense type coding, and pre-population of report data 
• A seamless mobile experience so travelers can capture and submit on the go 
• Native integration between travel booking and expense, so employees are never managing two separate processes 
• Robust reporting that surfaces patterns at the program level, not just individual transactions 
• Scalability to absorb acquisitions and onboard new employees without rebuilding from scratch each time 

For admins looking to get more out of their SAP Concur program, Rebecca’s approach is straightforward: learn the system deeply, use what it offers, and let it do the work it was built to do. 

“If Concur were to disappear tomorrow, it would be devastating. The efficiency of the expense process, the efficiency of having travel and expense connected — that would be difficult to replace.” 

- Rebecca Kelley, Travel and expense analyst, Meteor Education