‘Our focus is to have an expense report that is written, reviewed, audited, and processed all without human intervention’

SAP Concur is helping businesses with seamless travel, expense and invoice management experience through powerful insights on spends. Speaking to Express Computer, Mankiran Chowhan, Managing Director – Indian Subcontinent, SAP Concur shares how the company is creating an intelligent enterprise with its spend management solutions to improve compliance and reduce risk

How SAP Concur is leveraging technologies such as AI/ML, analytics and/or automation in its solution ?

With the uncertain market conditions continuing in 2021 and many companies extending their work-from-home orders, we expect continued investment in AI-powered solutions that simplify manual and inefficient processes, especially those that require in-person coordination.

SAP Concur is already helping customers stay ahead of the tech curve with solutions that use AI and ML to simplify travel, expense, and invoice management. Employees can use their smartphones to take photos of receipts, and then easily upload these to expense reports. Travel information can be pulled into reports from travel booking sites, emails, and corporate credit cards. Accounts payable professionals are saying goodbye to paper receipts and can complete tasks more quickly and accurately.

To make everything from travel booking to expense auditing smarter, automated, and easier for employees, we use AI and ML to add intelligence to applications and reduce dependency on manual processes. For example – we have moved beyond the optical character recognition (OCR) technology, which is an industry-standard to extract data from images. We have infused machine learning in our products – Concur Invoice and Concur Expense – that can recognise handwritten tips and totals from pictures of employees’ receipts, then automatically populate line items in an expense report.

Finance managers can use our AI-assisted programs to automatically review each expense report and flag inaccuracies based on comparisons against hundreds of data elements in seconds. Our AI/ML-enabled solutions can help companies comply with respective tax regulations, identify hidden risks and prohibited spends, eliminate any chances of fraudulent claims and improve compliance through robust internal control over expense before it even happens.

Within the SAP Concur mobile app, ExpenseIt uses traditional OCR to extract information from receipt photos. Where our technology goes further than others is by using ML to add context to receipt information. By identifying and understanding data like currencies, dates, and expense types, receipt photos can be easily and automatically converted into completed expense reports.  Our focus is to have an expense report that is written, reviewed, audited, and processed all without human intervention and that’s where technologies like AI and ML play a role in making that happen.

Please highlight the innovations being brought into your spend management solution offerings that could prove more beneficial for enterprises in post-Covid period.

Our solutions are based on an understanding of the priorities of our customers; balancing compliance, safety, and productivity needs; making the employee experience a priority, and creating an intelligent enterprise. Our spend management solutions leverage the depth and breadth of data from our 66 million users to analyse behaviours and pinpoint trends. Digital initiatives across sectors have gradually reduced dependency on paper in the workplace. Companies that have adopted electronic expense reporting instead of paper receipts and expense forms have experienced a whopping 58 per cent reduction in processing costs and greater ROI. In the corporate world, this could signal the beginning of a paperless culture especially now when people are working remotely without much use of pen and paper.

By leveraging AI, we are capable of auditing every expense across any currency, any language, and every market where companies operate. This helps bring consistency and efficiency to the process while maintaining tighter control over spending – without adding any overhead.

Finance is one of the departments that has been impacted most by widespread remote work. These employees often rely on manual processes to print and mail invoices and cash checks. Without a physical office to enable these processes, many scrambled to track down payments in the mail and get invoices out in time. Not only did this impact company financials but it also strained valuable partner relationships. We expect more companies to use our AI-powered invoice management solutions to digitize the process, automatically capture invoices and purchase orders, and audit each document to eliminate financial inaccuracies.

We are also working on advances in technology services that will increasingly anticipate business needs, whether related to expense reports, scheduling, or other processes. Eventually, these services will be able to carry out tasks, partially or fully, with more accuracy and speed than a human being. It is a trend that will bring more benefits in the post-Covid era.

What are the considerable tech-based challenges and opportunities that have emerged in the post-Covid era for companies like SAP Concur?

The pandemic has pushed a large part of the global workforce in the confines of their homes which, as a result, has been working remotely. In such a scenario, technology has proven to be one of the most valuable assets.

Cloud adoption would be a big part as finance leaders would look at digitizing quickly to achieve analytical capabilities, scalability, ease-of-operations, improved customer experience, and reduced security risks.

There will also be opportunities to develop Intelligent Assistants that will go beyond automatic data capture and analysis to predicting and making recommendations based on instantaneous analysis of a variety of data sources. For example – assistants powered by AI and ML will predict when a company would exceed budgetary limitations based on its previous spending patterns and those at similar organizations. It would also make recommendations to maximize budget, while also maintaining the employee experience, based on employee satisfaction studies and costs and policies at other companies.

We are looking forward to an enhanced focus on enriching the employees’ experience and providing them with the required support to increase their productivity and positive sentiments. In order to improve the employee experience, mobile tools with the latest technologies like AI and ML will emerge as major facilitators. Once business travel gradually starts, there would be a renewed emphasis on providing digital solutions for processes like expense claims and employee safety. This will give impetus to the use of intelligent digital solutions – like SAP Concur’s travel and expense solutions – by organisations across all sectors.

In the arena of business travel, ML is expected to continue to alleviate pain points in corporate travel programs by redirecting tedious tasks with automated technology. As ML recognises patterns in traveller behaviours, it will move from anticipating and recommending itineraries, to completely booking travel based on past experiences, calendar holds, user profiles and preferred loyalty programs.

The evolving role of finance is another change in the post-Covid era that has become the key driver of business growth in the new normal. Finance leaders have to play a crucial role in taking critical business decisions based on the budget versus spend analysis. To manage their financial health and maintain a healthy cash flow, companies will need 100 per cent visibility and control over their operational expenditure. This would further accelerate the adoption of Intelligent Spend Management (ISM) solutions to ensure effective spend governance in the organisations.

What will be the focus for the year 2021 and the growth strategy?

India is a key growth market for SAP Concur. At SAP Concur, it is our endeavor to provide businesses with seamless travel, expense and invoice management experience through powerful insights on spends. We remain focused on delivering the most innovative and agile solutions in the market, and helping our customers simplify and automate their everyday processes. Additionally, our investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) enable us to unlock greater compliance, security, and savings for our customers, while simultaneously improving their employee productivity and satisfaction.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made organisations realize the importance of digital transformation and has resulted in accelerated adoption of digital solutions for different business processes and operations. We look forward to continuing the momentum of taking companies of different sizes and maturity beyond automation to a completely digitised and connected travel, expense and invoice management solution, which helps to improve compliance and reduce risk.