Admin Tips & Tricks: Advance Your Program - Request

Erica Brown · Dec 7, 2025

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:

Request

Avoid booking delays with Passive Approval

In Concur Request, any pending steps can be auto-approved a set number of hours or days before the deadline—so trips in Concur Travel aren’t cancelled due to missed approvals. For state and local governments, it’s especially useful for emergency response teams, when delegate approvers or EAs may be unavailable, and speed is critical.

Enable Expected Expenses for faster pre-trip approvals

In Concur Request, enabling the Expected Expenses feature allows certain expense types, like meals or taxis, to be automatically pre-approved before travel. This streamlines the approval process for low-risk, predictable spend and helps travelers book more efficiently.

Define when travelers can self-book with the Booking Switch

The Booking Switch in Concur Request lets administrators control whether a trip should be booked by the traveler in Concur Travel or routed through an agency. Set criteria like departure/arrival location, itinerary type, or segment type to guide the booking path. This feature can be combined with the Enforce Online/Offline Policy setting to automatically redirect users to Concur Travel when appropriate.

Enable Cancellation Request to streamline trip changes

In Concur Request, turning on the Cancellation Request feature allows users to cancel approved requests when plans change. If the ticket hasn’t been issued and the booking wasn’t an instant purchase, the trip is automatically canceled within Concur Travel. For bookings made outside of Concur Travel – such as those handled by a travel agency – canceling the request can trigger a notification to the TMC (if configured) for agency-booked segments. Canceled requests remain attachable to expense reports, unlike closed requests, offering added flexibility in post-trip processing.

Allow administrators to re-open closed requests

Enable this setting in Concur Request to give administrators the ability to re-open closed requests – helpful when a traveler accidentally closes a request before attaching it to an expense report. Re-opening the request restores its availability for proper expense reconciliation.

Enable the Request Assistant feature

This AI-powered tool in Concur Request uses generative AI and SAP Concur benchmark data to instantly estimate costs for flights, hotels, trains, taxis, car rentals, and meals—cutting down the time spent researching trip expenses. Users can refine estimates by adjusting details like hotel rating or flight stops, with pricing updating in real time. Learn more.

Expand Request processes for visibility and control

Don’t limit Concur Request to travel—use it to manage approvals for catering, corporate cards, continuing education, office furniture, non-per diem meals, annual stipends, software, and more. Centralizing these requests in one system improves visibility, speeds approvals, and ensures spend is tracked before it happens.