Admin Tips & Tricks: Spend Management - Workflow

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:

Workflow

Custom workflows on Standard Edition

Build rules or steps with custom workflows for Standard Edition in certain circumstances (e.g. skipping an approval step, needing an additional step or need a special approval). If you’ve already implemented your site, we can activate these features (for a fee).

Track your monthly expense reports

Quickly see how many expense reports your organization is submitting with the usage reports. Find the Billed Transaction Reconciliation monthly report. It’s located in Reporting > Standard Reports > Administration folder.

Workflow cycle times

Monitor how long it takes an expense report or invoice to move through the major workflow steps so you can identify bottlenecks in the process and justify your investment to internal stakeholders. (Folder: Expense Processing* or Invoice > Workflow Cycle Time Details.) See more here. *Note: Intelligence is required for the Expense Processing report

Manage cashflow with accruals

Determine the amount of expenses not assigned to expense reports and those assigned to a report but not yet paid so you can gain visibility into your outstanding liabilities, have more accurate financial reporting, and better manage cash flow (Folder: Accrual > Expense Accrual, and Accrual > Expense Accrual by Date Range). You can also look at the Intelligence report “Top Employees with Unassigned or Unsubmitted CC Transactions”. These are great reports for CBCP companies.

Reduce liabilities on late transactions

To help enforce policy, manage cash flow and reduce your liabilities on taxable expenses, create an audit rule with a hard stop or allow the user to provide an explanation on any expense submissions older than 60 days or per your policy. These require additional support and approval and will help reinforce good behavior to users (Standard Edition only allows with Custom Audit rules).

Setting up your approvers

Find your approvers and make sure they’re comfortable creating and approving reports and invoices . Ensure they have their profile setup correctly (receiving emails when they have reports or invoices to approve) and are reviewing attached receipts.

Increasing approver and processor efficiency

Configure these to improve efficiencies for your approvers and processors:

Approve & Forward: Allows the approver to quickly add another approver as needed
Send to approver: Allows the processor to send the report to an additional approver
Review in progress: Marks a report or invoice as under work by that processor, typically used when there is a question pending for the employee of that report. Your organization can also configure additional columns to display.

Processor home page

Processors can set up their own personal home page in system settings so that they go directly to the processor page upon login to increase efficiency.

Speed up approval process by individual

The Top 10 Longest to Approve report provides a rank of the longest time to approve expense reports or invoices and includes approver and employee names. Target approvers on this list with details about how the Concur mobile app can be used to approve expense reports and invoices. Find in the Expense Processing* or Invoice folders. *Note: Intelligence is required for the Expense Processing report

Split expense report approval

Consider turning on the Split Expense Report Approval feature in Concur Expense. This enables your organization to reject a single line item on an expense report, allowing the remainder to be paid to the corporate card or reimbursed to the user. This also reinforces good education to the end users as to why an expense line item was rejected. Note: the rejected line item(s) start a new expense report

Send back codes

Implement send back codes to help processors track and report on why reports are sent back to users. Then, set up audit rules or drive targeted training and communications to help address and reduce issues. Available for Standard edition with custom workflow.

Expense report submission hard stop vs. soft stop

While a “hard stop” submission process will not allow the user to submit an expense report that is out of policy or not complete, a “soft stop” approach can be seen as more user friendly. For example, you can block (hard stop) an expense report from not being submitted if it includes an un-itemized hotel bill. However, a “soft stop” would allow a user to submit an expense report even if it didn’t include receipts for expenses under $25, and instead might alert the manager or target them for audit.

Email reminders(Professional edition required)

In addition to using the pre-defined rules for expenses and invoices (Overdue Receipts, Overdue Reports, Overdue Company Card Transactions, etc.), configure additional email reminders by creating or updating rules and email configurations.

Connected lists information(Intelligence required)

A Concur Expense Administrator can create a report in Intelligence to pull information in connected lists (e.g., names and ID codes). This can be used to easily manage these connected lists, and then can be imported into Concur Expense to edit or remove items from them.

Improve your purchasing card (p-card) program

Get more visibility and control by centralizing your p-card process. Send these transactions through Company Bill Statements (CBS), a service by SAP Concur solutions. Reconciling all p-card and expense transactions provides a more complete picture of your employee-initiated spend.

SAP native integration

SAP Concur solutions native integration on SAP ERP 6.0 + and SAP S/4HANA offers joint customers real-time solutions that accelerate the digital transformation of finance. You can now seamlessly manage finance data throughout the entire spend process, eliminating the need for manual processes.

Expense report consistency after configuration changes

After making major changes in your configuration, create an audit rule that prevents users from submitting an expense report before the date when the changes were made. This helps ensures all changes are reflected on any submitted expense reports (Standard Edition only allows with Custom Audit rules).

Track report status with confidence

After submission, a confirmation appears on-screen, and users can track report status directly from the Expense page under Active or Archived Reports. Returned reports are highlighted in red—click to review and revise.

Expense and Invoice Spend Management dashboards(Intelligence required)

The Expense Spend Management Overview dashboard provides key metrics for your organization’s expense reports and their life cycle. The Invoice Spend Management Overview dashboard similarly shows metrics for the invoice process. These dashboards show the impact on cashflow and help evaluate the need for any changes in processes. Find in Persona Dashboards.