SAP Concur, which provides travel and expense management solutions, has said a recent survey said that 31 per cent of business travellers were stressed about filing expense reports after a business trip in the middle of a busy workday.

Owing to the existing gap in business travel expense management solutions, the survey also revealed that 32 per cent of employees lost over ₹7,000 of their savings on a travel-related business expense that wasn’t reimbursed. The survey was conducted among 500 Indian business travellers.

Mankiran Chowhan, Managing Director – Indian Subcontinent, SAP Concur, told BusinessLine that success in business today means finding ways to be more productive while reducing costs. “However, as spending gets easier, driving control and improving employee experience gets more complicated. By automating and integrating travel, expense, and invoice management, we are helping our customers build an intelligent spend management platform. This enables them to uncover valuable spend data, simplify processes, and make smart decisions,” she said.

SAP Concur has also tied up with HDFC Bank and Mastercard to enable corporates to reconcile and manage company spending.

HDFC Bank will offer a corporate credit card for business travellers, providing a one-stop solution for payment and expense management during business trips. The corporate credit card will enable a seamless integration of all business-related spend into SAP Concur offerings, enhancing the employee experience, increasing visibility, saving money, and improving corporate efficiency. The card is supported by MasterCard.

Chowhan said that with prior visibility of the expenses, the finance and other departments are able to better plan business expenses, ensure right budget allocation and implement robust control measures to improve overall compliance and bring in cost efficiencies. This also helps the companies in adopting sustainable solutions by moving away from the age-old pen and paper-based processes and further reducing the carbon footprint.

The ‘Locate’ service of SAP Concur enables the human resources (HR) department in connecting real-time with the employees during their travel and ensure their safety in case of any emergency.

Chowhan said in 2020, SAP Concur will continue to gain momentum in the enterprise space by focussing on key industries, namely manufacturing, financial services and insurance, IT/ITES, pharma and life sciences and retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG).

“We see huge potential in the Indian market as most of the organisations still follow paper-based processes. As per an SAP Concur survey, more than 3 in 4 Indian business travellers believe their company is behind in adopting the test technologies to manage business travel.”

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