Admin Tips & Tricks: Advance Your Program - Auditing

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Admin Tips & Tricks

Our Admin Tips & Tricks resource provides you with expert-approved advice and peer-sourced tips to boost efficiency and control. Navigate across all three Tips & Tricks sections to browse tips surrounding Spend Management, Travel Management, and Optimizing your T&E Program. Or, use the topic titles within each section to jump to a specific topic area of your choice.

• Spend Management
• Travel Management
• Program Optimization

Advance Your Travel and Expense Program

As your organization evolves, so should the way you manage spend. Concur offers powerful tools beyond travel and expense that can help you drive greater visibility, accuracy, and control across your business. In this collection of articles, find expert-backed tips to help you take advantage of capabilities like audit rules, mileage tracking, pre-spend approvals, and data-driven reporting. Whether you’re aiming to catch errors before they become issues or streamline how employees request and track spend, these insights are designed to help you elevate your travel and spend management strategy.

In this section, you will find peer and expert-sourced guidance on the following topics:

• Auditing
• Car and Mileage
• Request
• Reporting

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Auditing

Use AI to audit expense reports

Concur recommends auditing expenses with AI to achieve comprehensive fraud mitigation and policy compliance. Your organization should automatically review expenses for policy, VAT, receipt substantiation, and fraud/anomaly patterns. Manual intervention can provide additional context, review of high-risk expenses, and more. Learn more about our compliance portfolio.

Take both a preventive and detective approach to expense auditing

As part of onboarding, let employees know: expense reports are now reviewed by a third-party audit team, and compliance is taken seriously. Reinforce that 100% of expense reports are subject to review, and make sure employees know where to find and follow your T&E policy. To support this approach, use solutions like Concur Detect by Oversight, Verify, and Intelligent Audit to layer in pre- and post-payment checks, guided user training, and actionable analytics—without adding manual burden to your team. See the difference between our audit solutions.

Reports to consider:

• Report Entry Exceptions – find which audit rule exceptions are triggered at the line-item level
• Report Header Exceptions – see which audit rule exceptions are triggered at the expense report level

Add custom audit rules

Custom audit rules guide employees to follow your T&E policy by defining what’s allowed, what’s not, and what needs review. Use audit rules, expense type limits, and exception messages to stop non-compliance before reports are submitted. Most rules can be enabled at no cost, though some may require help from your implementation team. For details, see the resources below or contact your SAP Concur account team.

Expense Professional Edition:

• Audit Rule Administration Guide
• Exceptions Administration Guide
• Expense Type Limits Administration Guide

Expense Standard Edition:

• Compliance Controls Administration Guide
• Custom Audit Rules Administration Guide

If unable to Audit 100%, audit new employees

Audit the transactions of new employees for 90 days to 6 months to ensure they understand your policies. Some companies also use in-app guidance tools, like Concur User Assistant by WalkMe, to help employees submit accurate reports from day one—reducing common audit flags.

Don’t rely on manager approvals alone

Manager approval doesn’t always mean policy compliance. Use reporting tools to uncover gaps in your current process—and identify where additional audit controls may be needed.

Reports to consider:

• The Reports Approved but Receipts Not Viewed report (Intelligent Audit) helps you spot which managers are approving reports without reviewing receipts. This can reveal when approvals are happening without due diligence.
• Pair that with Workflow Cycle Times – Summary by Manager and Summary by Processor to assess how long approvals are taking and where bottlenecks may exist.

Audit out-of-pocket expenses

Use reporting tools to identify employees with a high percentage of out-of-pocket cash spend. This can help flag potential compliance risks – since cash expenses are harder to validate – and may point to opportunities to issue a corporate card, if your organization offers one. Auditing these expenses more closely or shifting spend to card-based transactions increases visibility, reduces fraud risk, and simplifies reconciliation.

Reports to consider:

• Excessive Personal Car Mileage – Review which employees have submitted excessive personal car mileage to decide if it's better to use a company vehicle, rental vehicle, or an alternative reimbursement method.

Spot when expensed rates exceed reservations

Identify repeat offenders and drill into reports to uncover added upgrades or non-compliant charges. This level of insight is only possible with a fully connected T&E platform—where booking and expense data flow together in real time, giving you visibility our competitors simply can’t match.

Reports to consider:

• Booked vs. Actual – Summary by Employee – See when the expensed amount for car rentals or hotel stays exceeds the rate reserved at the time of booking.

Audit duplicate transactions with intelligence

Duplicate expenses can quietly inflate spend and undermine compliance. Configure detection rules to flag transactions with the same date, amount, and merchant—or identify scenarios like both a manager and employee expensing the same meal. For more robust control, modify your workflow to include automated checks through implementing the SAP Concur Compliance Portfolio, including Intelligent Audit, Verify, and Concur Detect by Oversight. These tools help catch fraud and reduce manual effort—while tailoring logic to fit your policy.

Reports to consider:

• Duplicate Company Meals – which employees are turning in their own meal expenses but are also listed as attendees for other employees.
• Duplicate Expense Items – duplicate expense submissions by the same employee.
• Duplicate Hotel Stays – multiple overlapping hotel expenses by the same employee.
• Duplicate Meal Attendees – the same meal attendee appearing on multiple submissions for the same meal.

Limit meal amounts

You can limit or flag meals based on travel allowance, which is best practice, or even on individual meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) if you have a need. Concur Expense can flag the accumulated individual meals over the entire day. You can also require a comment for meals over a certain amount. Be sure to establish a communication channel with your end users to evaluate if the travel allowance in a region or metro area needs to be adjusted.

Reports to consider:

• Expenses Near Receipt Limit – expenses just below your indicated receipt limit.
• Submitted Ticket Charges with Unsubmitted Refunds – corporate card refunds that have yet to be processed.

Use MCC Codes to strengthen compliance

Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) can help flag risky or non-compliant spend that may not appear in your card provider’s “unusual activity” reports. Review past incidents and configure audits to flag high-risk MCCs proactively. Work with your corporate card program to apply compliance-based restrictions—so out-of-policy spending is blocked before it happens. Tools like Verify and Intelligent Audit help automate these checks and support proactive compliance across your program.

Track business travel across jurisdictions to stay compliant with tax and immigration rules

Track employee travel across state and national borders to avoid unexpected tax, social security, or immigration exposure. With governments increasing enforcement, it’s important to monitor jurisdictional risk proactively. App Center partners like EY, Deloitte, and Topia integrate with SAP Concur to help identify potential issues during the booking process. Solutions like Benefits Assurance by Blue dot can also provide the data you need to support compliance. Browse tax management partners.

Monitor Reports in Analysis Intelligence around compliance with systemic rules you have in place.

This will help identify potential rogue spenders' -- people of interest or areas needing training on policies within the organization. If not auditing 100%, as part of your Concur services, work with your designated report auditor to modify or create new dashboards around the systemic rules you have in place.

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• Next: Car and Mileage

Download the full PDF guide here