You’ve Been Flexible, but Are You Ready for What’s Ahead?

You adapted, readapted, and reinvented. You developed more resilience than you thought possible. But if there’s one lesson from the past two years, it’s that more challenges and opportunities are ahead. 

Many of your company’s policies and processes have been scrutinized as revenue, spending, workplaces, travel, and other elements of business shifted. One part worthy of ongoing scrutiny is the employee experience, a quick way to summarize interactions with policies, processes, and technology and how employees feel about those encounters. 

Two data points show why employee experience is top of mind: Recent surveys find 25% to 40% of workers might quit their job within a year, while 78% told our partner Accenture that their employer is responsible for helping increase their job satisfaction and well-being.  

Your organization has been flexible – about spending, travel, working from home, and more – because it was necessary. But now that many employees see that as the norm, is your company ready to embrace it in a systemic way through processes and technology? 

As a SAP Concur customer, your business has already invested in solutions that deliver a connected travel and expense experience. Extending and enhancing the solutions is a way to address and improve the employee experience, while gaining greater visibility and control of costs and compliance. 

A new tip sheet, Building a Better Experience, takes a deeper look at additions that can serve finance teams and often other employees as well. Below are examples of how meeting today’s expectations about work, technology, and processes can satisfy your company’s goals at the same time. 

Receipts, audits, AI, and integration 

Just as employees don’t want to spend more time than necessary on receipts and expense reports, finance team members would rather do engaging work like forecasting instead of chasing paper. 

The ExpenseIt app lets users take pictures of receipts on a smartphone and automatically itemizes and categorizes expenses. With Concur Request, employees can quickly seek approval for an expense before it occurs, submitting prices and justifications while enabling the company to approve, modify, or reject. 

Concur Detect by Oversight automatically reviews receipt and expense data, and allows auditors to focus on cases where risk has been identified. Intelligent Audit uses artificial intelligence (AI) and a team of expert auditors to help businesses find non-compliant spending and meet tax and regulatory obligations. Through automation, Concur Invoice delivers employees from the tedious handling of invoices while integrating with ERP and other systems.  

Safety and the changing nature of work 

Business travelers want to take to the road again soon if they haven’t already. Employees are working from home, and that’s likely to remain the case for some. Businesses are again planning in-person events. Safety, duty of care, and spending patterns all come into play. 

In addition to gathering itineraries and other travel details in one place, the TripIt Pro app has COVID-19 guidelines for destinations and many other health and safety features, along with timely alerts about changes. Travelers receive information and peace of mind, while employers fulfill duty of care. The SAP Concur App Center is another resource, seamlessly connecting receipt, expense, and other information to your SAP Concur solutions. 

With in-person events returning, visibility into expenses allows better cost controls and decision-making. Concur Event Management by Groupize is an all-in-one solution that eases and speeds event planning, while allowing you to enforce spending policies. You gain the tool to run events yourself, while gathering data to guide budgeting in the future. 

Education, adoption, and feedback 

It will be harder to improve the employee experience if workers feel like nobody is listening or are consistently frustrated by technology or processes. This is especially true as they return to the workplace or relearn technology they have hardly touched in ages. 

Operating within existing solutions, Concur User Assistant service by WalkMe provides training and guidance to drive adoption and enforce policies. Concur Experience Optimizer combines technology and expert consultants to gather hard data on how users really feel about using your travel and expense solutions. You receive insights to improve compliance, cost efficiency, duty of care, and the overall employee experience. 

Learn more 

Obtain a copy of Building a Better Experience to discover more about how SAP Concur extensions can expand upon and connect existing solutions to help provide the experience employees seek, as well as allow your finance team to focus on the engaging work that matters most.