Admin Tips & Tricks: Spend Management - Expense Entry

Erica Brown · Dec 7, 2025

Take Control of Spend

We’ve gathered proven tips and expert insights to help you tighten compliance, reduce manual work, and improve the accuracy and speed of your spend processes. Many of these best practices come straight from SAP Concur administrators who’ve been where you are—working to avoid common pitfalls, shift from reactive to proactive, and focus on what drives real value.

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

Expense Entry

Tracking Ancillary Fees

Enable the Airline Fee expense type within your expense policy to capture ancillary fees automatically. This data will flow into reporting, allowing you to run detailed Airline Ancillary Fees Summary reports (found under Spending > Airline Ancillary Fees Summary). You can also set a flight fee threshold within your expense policy; for example, any expense under $75 will be automatically categorized as an airline fee.

Improving attendee entry

Turn on these features to make it easier to add attendees:

Favorite Groups feature lets employees who frequently work with the same group of attendees to create a favorite group and add them to another expense (e.g. business meal) with one easy selection.
My Team feature lets users quickly select other team members as attendees. Team is derived by Concur Expense automatically from the default approvers in the user profile, as well as approver’s peers (who report to the same approver).
Enable calendar synchronization in the Concur Mobile app to easily add attendees from calendar meetings (Note: Calendar must be synced to the native calendar for the mobile device)

Conditional display fields

With configuration, administrators can show or hide custom fields depending on selections made by users in other custom fields. As an example, for billable expenses, you can now choose to display a custom field “project” or “client” when the user has checked an expense as “billable.”

Reconciling statement and reimbursable expenses

Users can edit expenses within reports by choosing “Edit” from the ellipsis or by double clicking the expense line item. Within the details, users should verify the expense type, enter a business purpose, code it properly, and attach a receipt. Red alerts must be addressed before submission; yellow alerts are warnings but don’t block submission. Users may also update multiple expenses at the same time, such as applying an allocation, by selecting the checkbox next to each expense and choosing “allocate” from the ellipsis next to the expense entry.

Require itemized hotel charges

SAP Concur recommends requiring itemized hotel receipts to ensure accurate tax reporting, proper expense categorization, and policy compliance. If your organization uses ExpenseIt, our AI capabilities can automatically itemize hotel receipts—helping users follow policy with less manual effort and improving data accuracy. Itemization also makes it easier to detect personal or unapproved charges (e.g., minibar, spa, or added guest fees) that might otherwise be bundled into a single lodging total.

Verify Smart Matches

SAP Concur recommends requiring users to review all automatically matched expenses before submitting reports. Smart Matching pairs corporate card transactions with receipts, e-receipts, or travel itineraries (when Travel is integrated with Expense) to streamline reconciliation. Reviewing these matches ensures expense types, dates, and amounts are accurate.

How it works: Smart Matching compares imported and manually created expenses, analyzing similarities across key data points such as amount, date, vendor, and currency. The more fields that align exactly or closely, the higher the likelihood of a match. When a high-confidence match is detected, expenses are automatically merged into a single entry. If the match is less certain, SAP Concur sends the information to a partner (using large language models) that helps validate the vendor information before finalizing the match.
When review is required: If a match cannot be confirmed automatically, users will be prompted to confirm or reject the match when they next open Concur Expense. Confirmed matches will merge into one expense; rejected matches will remain separate. This ensures accuracy while maintaining user control.