Optimise SAP Concur: 5 signs that an audit is required

When you deployed SAP Concur, the objective was clear: simplify travel and expense management, automate processes, and strengthen compliance. That objective remains fully relevant today.

But your needs are evolving. New organisational structures, internal changes, increasing regulatory requirements, and cost pressures all affect how the solution needs to operate. At the same time, SAP Concur itself is evolving rapidly, with growing integration of artificial intelligence, new reporting and management capabilities, and increasingly advanced automation.

The result: even a solution as robust as SAP Concur may, over time, no longer be perfectly aligned with your current reality. Poorly applied local tax rules, manual processes creeping back in, partial use of new AI capabilities, incomplete budget visibility, or a gradual loss of visibility into the configuration and internal knowledge of the setup (often due to employee turnover) are all signs that it is time to take stock.

The potential for savings is significant: according to IDC, SAP Concur can generate an ROI of up to 628% over three years. But fully leveraging the solution's capabilities requires regularly checking that your configuration keeps pace with product developments and your own business needs.

• 5 signs indicate that an SAP Concur audit is needed: lack of automation (with a risk of control issues and fraud, not just wasted time), loss of visibility and group-wide governance over the configuration, a degraded user experience, an underused Concur ecosystem, and underused reporting data.
• SAP Concur can generate an ROI of 628% over three years according to IDC, provided its capabilities are fully leveraged.
• Recent AI innovations (Joule, AI-assisted delegate dashboards, enhanced OCR, AI-powered rule creation) are often still underused in instances that have been deployed for several years.
• The Arago Health Check covers configuration auditing, gap identification, personalised recommendations, and, if required, their implementation.

Your processes still lack automation

If your HR or Finance teams still spend time creating Excel exports, correcting errors, or checking for duplicates, it is likely that some automation opportunities have not been implemented, or that existing automations are not optimised to take advantage of SAP Concur's current capabilities. Concur is evolving rapidly: is your configuration keeping pace?

This lack of automation is not simply a matter of wasted time. It is also a control issue: the less automated your validation and anomaly detection rules are, the greater the risk that fraudulent expense claims or out-of-policy spending will go unnoticed. An audit therefore benefits HR and Finance teams by improving operational efficiency, while also helping Finance departments strengthen risk management.

You have added new countries, but the solution has not kept pace

Geographical expansion, a new entity, or an additional subsidiary: beyond the technical configuration itself (tax rules, currencies, VAT rates, Travel Allowances), what often deteriorates is visibility and group-wide governance of the solution. 
Turnover among the teams responsible for configuration, loss of internal knowledge about the setup, additional deployments carried out without genuine harmonisation, and uncontrolled autonomy given to subsidiaries are all very real challenges. They go beyond the technical dimension and become a genuine management and governance issue at leadership level. 
During a Health Check, Arago reviews both the local configuration and the consistency of group-wide governance across the entire scope.

Your users are reporting a poor experience

Too many screens, too many steps, misplaced receipts: this does not necessarily mean that Concur is poorly designed, but rather that your UX is no longer aligned with your users' expectations. 
Proper configuration ensures optimal adoption. On this point, Arago does more than simply identify the issue: our teams draw on UX best practices identified through previous audit assignments to propose concrete improvements that have already been successfully tested on other instances.

You are not benefiting from the latest Concur innovations.

One of the great advantages of cloud solutions such as SAP Concur is their ability to continuously evolve to incorporate new regulations, technologies, and market trends.

Concur continues to innovate: version V4, embedded artificial intelligence, new Dashboard Analytics, enhanced OCR, next-generation Travel Allowance... All these features are designed to improve efficiency and user experience.

An audit allows you to quickly identify features that are not enabled in your environment and deploy them to maximise the value of your solution.

Your reporting is incomplete or unreliable

If your exports are missing data, you do not have a consolidated view, or you spend time reprocessing information, it is time to review your access rights, segmentation, and reporting templates.

Good to know 

A generally recommended best practice for business SaaS solutions (HRIS, ERP, T&E) is to conduct an audit during the first few years after deployment to verify initial compliance, followed by regular reviews to monitor changing business needs and the impact of successive vendor updates. Since cloud solutions such as SAP Concur release several updates per year, a static configuration will inevitably fall behind the capabilities that are actually available.

Why conduct a Health Check with Arago? 

As SAP Concur experts, Arago conducts a comprehensive assessment of your instance, including:

• An audit of your current configuration, as well as the technical aspects of the architecture and interfaces (data flows with your HR, accounting, and banking systems)
• Identification of gaps compared with best practices
• Concrete, tailored recommendations
• Implementation of enhancements, if you wish, so that you can fully benefit from the latest technologies and features made available by SAP Concur

A well-configured platform means greater efficiency, compliance, and performance. Don't let your solution become outdated: evolve it in line with your needs and the vendor's innovations.

For a broader view of Travel & Expense management, see our complete guide: Travel & Expense (T&E) Management: Complete 2026 Guide.