Using Concur Audit to Close the Gaps in Compliance
When organisations first approach us to discuss how Concur Audit could support their compliance objectives, they typically have three key concerns:
- Lowering the cost of non-compliance
- Mitigating the risks of non-compliance
- Gaining greater control over costs.
We looked at how Concur Audit supports organisations in overcoming these concerns in a recent webinar: Closing the Gaps in Compliance: The Power of Audit. It was led by Emily Gosling, SAP Concur Audit Consultant – Enterprise, and it’s available to watch on-demand now.
Watch the Closing the Gaps in Compliance: The Power of Audit webinar on-demand now.
The webinar had four elements: an overview of Concur Audit, the onboarding process and best practice in compliance. There was also a walk-through of the auditing process to show exactly how the system works.
An Overview of Concur Audit
As Emily explained, Concur Audit offers four key benefits:
- It frees up in-house resources so you can focus on more value-add activities
- It provides focused, certified, independent and objective auditors
- It offers ongoing support to enable policy changes and query resolution
- It provides the opportunity to measure and evaluate trends over time.
The Concur Audit service operates out of seven global audit service centres. Each office is staffed with specifically trained and certified auditors. Together, they audit around 1.3 million expenses from over 4,000 customers a month.
When a report arrives with Concur Audit, it is placed in a queue and assigned to an auditor who has the relevant profile and qualifications. The standard Service Level Goal is to audit a report within a monthly average of three working days of it arriving in the system. (Turnaround times of 24 or 48 hours are available with an additional cost uplift.)
Onboarding for Concur Audit
Onboarding for Concur Audit is a three step process, which starts with customers sharing their travel and expense policies. Concur Audit experts review the policies and create a series of questions to audit the claim effectively. Finally, the audit result options are configured. These are typically:
- Approve or Pass – which means the report proceeds to the next step in the workflow
- Fail – which means the report is returned to the user for correction
- Approve with exception – which means the report passes but is flagged with an exception for exception reporting
- Pend – which means the report is changed to a ‘Pending Review Status’ for the appointed processor to review and approve or reject.
Customers can choose how many and which types of claim are audited. However, as Emily pointed out, when deciding on the level of auditing required, it may be useful to know that 93% of clients choose to have 100% of their claims audited.
Best Practice in Auditing
As Emily explained, having clear policies in place is the start of good compliance. Automation aids compliance because it acts as a rules engine. Concur Audit provides the human intervention that verifies key data and enhances compliance. It helps to change user behaviour, minimises the risk over over-payment and makes best use of your managers’ time.
She looked at some of the most common T&E policy checks, which she says many clients who don’t already have a policy in place use as the basis for their own policies when they start with Concur Audit.
Finally, Emily highlighted the importance of reviewing audit results. When you work with Concur Audit, you have a named point of contact who will follow up with you at agreed intervals to work with you to measure and evaluate results, gain insights and take action.