The SAP Concur Travel & Expense solution is very powerful, but when you combine SAP Concur with your SAP ERP system, the story is even stronger. Like every business process, Travel & Expense doesn’t exist on its own. It depends on master data (cost centers, internal orders, project work breakdown structure elements, etc.) and information stored in your SAP ERP system. When you integrate your SAP ERP system with SAP Concur, the value of your digital core is increased by unifying finance with all travel, expense, and invoice data for instant, real-time, and actionable insights.
To this end, SAP Concur provides you with the SAP Integration with Concur Solution (ICS) native connector. It allows to achieve an end-to-end integration between SAP Concur and SAP ERP which eliminates manual data entry across multiple systems and the delays of manual exporting. It allows you to replicate automatically your cost objects into SAP Concur with the ability to define the frequency of such replication and to setup some filters to only process the cost objects that you want to send to SAP Concur. On the other side, all the approved expense reports transactions are transferred into the ERP through the ICS and the feedback loop feature automatically detects financial posting errors and notifies the end user in SAP Concur that a correction should be made within its expense report data. This gives you a quick, simple and accurate way to process expense transactions in SAP Concur as well as a quick and easy posting of financial transactions and faster payments in the SAP ERP system. The SAP Integration with Concur Solution is available for the following ERPs: SAP ECC, S/4HANA On Premise and S/4HANA Cloud.
Here are some of the many features provided by such native connector:
- Eliminate manual processes—including file uploads and downloads.
- Minimize risk of posting errors by automation—keeping master data in both systems in sync.
- Simple integration process monitoring helps you quickly and efficiently identify and correct financial posting issues.
- Direct integration with SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA systems creates accurate data integrations for faster payments.
- Reduce the need for connectors and middleware to reduce system complexity.
- Flexible mapping and conversion to support customer-specific integration use cases.
Those features translate into immediate benefits for your organization:
- Faster financial posting, faster payments, and higher data integrity through near real time data integration, data consistency across systems. The new integration solution thus avoids most errors and even if an error occur it can quickly and easily be identified, analyzed and fixed.
- End-to-end, timely visibility into spending through fully automated, robust data integration
- Full process transparency through new integration monitoring tools in both systems.
- Lower Total Cost of Ownership (time and resources) through easy setup and maintenance and through a simplified system landscape.
For the CFO, this means near real time visibility and control of spend management, faster processing and posting of financial data, while maintaining data integrity and network security. For the CIO, the solution maintains network security (all the network connections are initiated from the ERP) and ERP integrity with easy setup, implementation and maintenance while future-proofing your investment.
Setting up the ICS on your SAP ERP is very easy:
- Download and install the ICS add-ons from the SAP Marketplace.
- Execute the guided configuration and integration instructions.
- Optional: Map SAP API fields to appropriate SAP Concur fields.
- Start the integration process with initial master data replication.
Furthermore, you can extend the capabilities of the ICS through provided BAdIs if you need to adjust the financial posting process to fulfill some local requirements, for example.
If you are interested by such native integration and want to benefit from this end to end visibility of all your spending in real time, please contact your SAP Concur Client / Sales Executive. You can also learn more about the ICS by visiting the SAP Integration with Concur Solutions web site.
