Travel and Expense
New SAP Concur Benchmark Report Reveals 6 Trends Reshaping Enterprise T&E
New benchmark insights from SAP Concur explore the changing behaviors, risks, and business realities behind enterprise employee spending.
What can millions of travel and expense transactions tell us about how businesses are changing? Quite a lot—when you know what to look for.
Every expense represents more than a dollar amount. It reflects where people are working, how organizations are operating, what employees need, and where policies or processes may be struggling to keep pace. Looking at one transaction may tell you what someone purchased. Looking across millions of transactions can reveal something bigger: How enterprise spend behavior is evolving.
That is the idea behind the latest SAP Concur enterprise spend benchmarks.
A Broader View of How T&E Is Changing
SAP Concur processes more than $1 trillion in spend annually across millions of transactions. That scale gives us a distinctive view into the patterns shaping business travel and employee spending and what those patterns may mean for organizations moving forward.
It also gives us an opportunity to look beyond the obvious. Your business is probably already well familiar with the fact that:
- Costs are rising
- Travel patterns are changing
- New types of purchases are entering expense programs
But those individual developments do not tell the whole story. The more useful question today is: What do these changes reveal about the way businesses operate?
Our new eBook, Beyond Cost Control: 6 Trends Redefining T&E, brings together SAP Concur customer benchmark data to examine that question. Rather than treating expense data as a record of what has already happened, the report explores what spending patterns can reveal about employee behavior, operational complexity, policy design, risk, and decision-making.
Why Benchmarking Matters Now
Finance and travel leaders have always tracked spending. The challenge is interpreting what the numbers mean within a business environment that is becoming more distributed and less predictable. For example, a larger expense report could point to higher prices, or it could reflect more complex trips, new business activities, or changes in how expenses are consolidated. Growth in a broad spending category could appear to be a classification issue, but it may also signal that employee purchasing behavior is moving faster than existing policies and reporting structures.
The number itself is only the beginning. Benchmarking your spending data provides a reference point that helps leaders compare what they are seeing inside their own programs with wider shifts across enterprise T&E, so they can identify where a trend may deserve closer attention. That perspective becomes increasingly valuable as organizations rely on spend data to guide forecasting, policy decisions, compliance strategies, employee experience, and investments in automation or AI.
Experience at Enterprise Scale
SAP Concur has spent decades helping organizations manage the complexity behind travel and expense management.
IDC describes SAP Concur as one of the most established names in corporate travel booking and expense management, with a large global footprint, extensive integration ecosystem, and experience supporting multinational organizations with complex requirements. That breadth matters when analyzing trends.
Enterprise T&E does not happen in a controlled environment. It spans different regions, industries, roles, policies, vendors, systems, and ways of working. Thus, T&E insights become more meaningful when they reflect this level of scale and variation.
Our benchmark research combines the depth of SAP Concur data along with our expertise developed from helping organizations manage T&E across changing economic conditions, workforce models, regulatory environments, and employee expectations. The goal is not simply to report that spending went up or down; it's to help leaders ask better questions about why – and how technology can help address the underlying challenges at scale.
Start Exploring the Latest Insights
The full eBook examines six trends influencing the future of enterprise T&E and what they may signal for finance, travel, procurement, compliance, and business leaders. You will find a closer look at questions such as:
- How is modern work influencing employee spending?
- What happens when cost control begins to affect the traveler's experience?
- Where might traditional expense categories be losing useful context?
- How does data quality influence compliance, reporting, and AI readiness?
- What can changing expense patterns tell leaders about broader business activity?
The findings are not intended to prescribe one approach for every organization. They provide a lens for evaluating your own spending environment, challenging old assumptions, and identifying where your policies, data, or controls may need to evolve.
Because the strongest T&E programs do more than capture transactions. They understand the story behind them.
