The Transformed Campus
How intelligent, automated SAP® Concur® solutions can revolutionize your campus approach to spend management
When managing distributed spend across your institution, it can be difficult to introduce new processes, even when they will simplify the work of faculty and staff and bring greater transparency and visibility to finance leaders and budget managers.
But what if you could evangelize the solution you seek across campus offices and departments, showing faculty and staff how less time spent on expense reports and payment reconciliation translates to more time spent on student-focused projects and other high-value tasks?
Join us today on a campus tour to learn how improved processes and a more holistic view of spend make SAP Concur the right choice for your institution.
Financial Aid
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Concur Expense
Concur Travel
Early each year, your financial aid advisors take to the road to work with rising high school juniors and seniors on the college application and financial aid/FAFSA process. This outreach ensures students and their parents are taking the right steps to prepare for and pay for college. With expense reporting, automated mileage tracking, and travel booking all in one simplified solution, they can spend more time with students and less time on paperwork.
Accounts Payable
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Concur Invoice
Payment Solutions
Higher education institutions have widely embraced decentralized spending, where staff and faculty book their own travel and use multiple methods for payment. But if your accounts payable office doesn’t have the right technology in place, decentralized spend can make it nearly impossible to stay up to date on expense tracking, invoices, and other AP functions. SAP Concur offers intelligent, automated tools that integrate with your ERP system’s financial function. Imagine the time saved when:
• Expense reports arrive on time, 100% complete, with attached receipts
• Paper invoices can be input via optical character recognition (OCR) technology
• Invoices, check requests, purchase orders, and goods-received notes (GRNs)
are automatically reconciled
• Vendors can be paid within the same system
• Potentially noncompliant or fraudulent spending is flagged automatically
With so much time saved, AP staff can speed through their backlog of work to focus on more value-added tasks.
Procurement
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Concur Expense
Concur Invoice
Concur Travel
Employee-initiated spend is not fun or easy to track — and the consequences of not tracking it are even less fun. Without a full view of spend across campus, the procurement office can’t tell if spend is compliant with university or legal rules, negotiate discounts with oft-used vendors, or take advantage of p-card rebates. Budgets may run amok, and the procurement office is left in the dark.
But employees aren’t going to stop booking travel via mobile devices and even their own personal travel accounts. SAP Concur captures all spend, from your university’s preferred travel providers to invoices to employee-initiated spend. With an easier expense reporting process, employees will provide more receipts and information. At the same time, SAP Concur can capture employee spend that’s happening through different systems and directly with suppliers, so you can finally see and manage all of your spend.
Study Abroad/Global Education
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Concur Locate
SAP Concur
and Terra Dotta
Concur TripLink
In every situation where students travel – whether to out-of-state conferences or on study-abroad programs – institutions must hold themselves to a high standard of Duty of Care. Should a natural disaster or other incident happen, you need a way to find and communicate with students, staff, or faculty via their mobile devices in that location as well as arrange for on-the-ground assistance if needed.
To provide proper Duty of Care, your institution needs a way to track incidents occurring worldwide, the locations of traveling faculty, staff, and students, and the locations of students studying abroad. SAP Concur can connect all the dots. It can track travelers via itineraries, credit card data, and receipts. Concur® Locate provides proactive incident tracking, and our partnership with Terra Dotta brings in location data for students on study abroad.
Finance
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Concur Expense
Finance
In today’s regulatory environment, institutions must have accurate, secured data and processes to curtail fraud and noncompliant spend. At the same time, alumni, students, and the public seek unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability. They need to know that your institution spends wisely, focusing funds on mission-critical, student-facing services, not seemingly inefficient overhead. However, outdated technology and siloed data make it difficult for the finance office to have the full, consolidated view of spend they need to control costs, detect misuse, and stay compliant.
A unified travel, expense, and invoice system provides the holistic, near real-time view of all spending, necessary for insightful cash forecasting, budgeting, and reporting. One university that implemented SAP Concur solutions found reporting to be the biggest benefit, bringing together expenses that were previously strung across multiple budgets and accounts into a single view.
Information Technology (IT)
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Concur Invoice
As the office in charge of procuring and distributing technology equipment across campus, IT leaders and staff know tracking spend is challenging, especially when purchases must be allocated to different cost centers across campus. IT needs a top-notch expense and invoice solution to manage this complexity. SAP Concur has the flexibility to assign expenses to multiple sources. And with Purchase Request, IT can assess technology purchases before they are made, while the campus can still employ a distributed spending model.
As important as this functionality is, even more key is how easily SAP Concur integrates with ERP, human resources, and accounting systems. It’s a secure, cloud-based platform, eliminating the need for time-consuming upgrades, with an easy browser-based interface and highly rated mobile app. And we embrace innovation, using AI and machine learning to advance capabilities like auditing for misuse, invoice processing, and locating travelers during emergencies for Duty of Care.
Advancement and Alumni Relations
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Concur Drive
Concur Expense
Concur Travel
Strong advancement officers play an essential role in higher education, working to grow the endowment and fund scholarships, academic programming, and other important educational resources. To do so, they travel – . And while they are meeting with alumni and other donors, the last thing they want to think about is expenses. Meanwhile, alumni relations staff are traveling regionally to host alumni events. Completing an expense report doesn’t get a donor agreement signed faster or engage important alumni, but it is essential for accurate budgeting in the organization.
Advancement and alumni relations, potentially more than any office on campus, will benefit from the full range of SAP Concur solutions. Snapping photos of receipts on the go, GPS-enabled mileage tracking, expense reports that write themselves via electronic receipts, and auto-generated travel itineraries – these solutions can take the hassle out of travel and shrink expense processing time from hours to minutes.
a lot
Athletics
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Concur Travel
Athletics involves a lot more travel than outsiders may realize, from recruitment trips by staff and coaches to team travel regionally and even interstate. This much travel can be incredibly costly in money and in time. Giving your staff and coaches simple tools to capture their expenses provides the visibility you need to stay on budget, keep spend in compliance with university and legal regulations, and minimize time spent on paperwork.
A full travel and expense solution like SAP Concur can also assist with Duty of Care responsibilities. Do you know where all your traveling staff and students are at every moment – and can you communicate with them and provide help should an incident occur? This essential responsibility cannot be sidelined.
Provost
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Concur TripLink
Universities and colleges face enormous pressure to scrutinize and cut costs, while also staying true to their mission, goals, and student support. For the provost, this means creating a culture of teaching and learning for students and faculty, while also keeping a handle on costs. Faculty travel to attend conferences and conduct research, while inviting guests from other institutions to campus for speaking, research, or artistic engagements. Whether these travel costs are funded by grants or the institution directly, accuracy and compliance are crucial. It’s also important to make these processes easy for busy faculty if you want to receive timely expense reports
and keep a close eye on budgets.
You need a solution that captures all travel spend, while providing the information you need to provide Duty of Care. Concur® TripLink connects trips, travelers, and itineraries, regardless of how the travel was booked. Faculty can easily track their itineraries and expenses, while the provost office can easily audit spend to ensure compliance and Duty of Care in the case of an emergency.
Conclusion
As your institution gains more insight into how much time and money staff from offices like financial aid, admissions, or advancement are spending on the road – and how AP, procurement, IT, and the finance office can gain better insight into and control over spend – you can also uncover ways to turn spend into a revenue stream. One university took miles earned via campus purchases and travel in a coordinated purchasing card program and turned those miles into scholarships for its study abroad program.
What can SAP Concur help your campus accomplish?
Contact us today to learn more.
Admissions
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Concur Drive
Concur Expense
Concur TripLink
As admissions counselors travel to college fairs and meet with high school students and parents to assist with the admissions process, their time needs to be spent with students, not on expense reports. Simplify their work lives with an automated expense report process. Concur® Drive, a GPS-enabled mobile app, can automatically track mileage and upload it into expense reports, while receipts can be added to reports simply by snapping a photo with a mobile device. Additionally, the information from email and receipts from airfare, hotel, ground transportation, and other suppliers automatically flow into expense reports, and receipts in multiple languages can be easily translated and processed. And, if your institution has admissions coordinators who travel interstate or internationally, they can easily book travel through the same integrated system.
Admissions
Financial Aid
Accounts Payable
Finance
Information Technology (IT)
Athletics
Advancement and Alumni Relations
Procurement
Provost
Study Abroad/Global Education
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IT