The systems your Concur platform needs to talk to

Ask a finance team where their time goes and very little of the answer is about SAP Concur itself. The system does what it is asked. The time goes into the space around it – the export, the spreadsheet, the re-key, the reconciliation that has to happen before anyone can close the month.

It is worth being precise about the cost, because “manual work” understates it. A re-key is not just the minutes it takes. It is a point at which the number can change. Every hand-moved figure introduces the possibility of a difference between two systems that somebody will later have to find and explain, usually at the least convenient moment in the calendar.

Where the gaps usually are

In most organisations there are two, and they sit either side of Concur.

The first is between Concur and the ledger. Approved expenses and invoices have to arrive in the finance system with the right cost centre, the right tax treatment and the right period. Where that journey is not automated, it is typically an export, a template, and someone who knows which columns matter – which works perfectly until that person is on leave.

The second is between Concur and HR. Joiners, leavers, cost centre moves, approval hierarchies and delegation all originate in the HR system, and they all change. Where the two are not connected, the expense platform gradually drifts out of step with the organisation chart. Claims route to people who have moved on. Approvals sit with managers who no longer manage that team. It is rarely dramatic and always corrosive.

The list is longer than people expect

The finance and HR platforms we are most often asked to connect SAP Concur to include Oracle NetSuite, SAP SuccessFactors, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage, Workday and HiBob. The specific combination matters less than the principle: an expense platform is only as accurate as the data flowing into it and only as useful as the data flowing out.

What connecting them removes is fairly consistent. Manual entry between systems goes. The reconciliation step that exists purely because two systems hold the same number goes with it. Month end shortens, not because any single task gets faster, but because a queue of dependent tasks stops existing.

What to establish first

• Which system is authoritative for each field. Cost centres, approvers and employee status should have exactly one source. Two sources is the problem, not the solution.
• How often the data actually needs to move. Nightly is right far more often than real time, and it is considerably cheaper to run and to reason about.
• What happens when a record fails. An integration with no visible error handling is a silent one, and silent integrations are how a period closes with a gap nobody spots for a quarter.
• Who owns it afterwards. Integrations need someone to look after them when a system upgrades. Deciding that at the start is much easier than discovering it later.

The point

Nobody sets out to build a finance process that depends on a spreadsheet in the middle. It accumulates, one reasonable workaround at a time, until it is simply how things are done. The useful exercise is to count the manual steps between systems and ask of each one whether it still needs to exist – because a surprising number of them are answering a question that was settled years ago.