travel and expense management Archives - �鶹ԭ�� Africa News Center

Concur Detect by Oversight: New Solution Tackles Fraud and Non-compliant Expenses Through AI

�鶹ԭ�� News — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 06:29:18 +0000

Companies have adjusted their operations to a digital-first world due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many companies have sped up their adoption of digital tools to enable employees to work remotely and to file in expenses and invoices digitally.

Despite this, companies continue to struggle with compliance challenges as employees submit expenses and invoices that may not adhere to corporate policies. According to��the ACFE’s��2020��“Report to the Nations”[1], the median loss to a��company��from expense report fraud is $33,000 per year, and a lack of internal controls contribute to nearly one in three frauds.

With many businesses operating on tighter budgets, there’s more pressure to increase spend compliance and reduce errors, fraud, and waste than ever. Timing is also of the essence as businesses expect the situation to become even more complex in the future. According to recent �鶹ԭ�� Concur research, almost half of finance and business leaders expect more frequent audit and punitive penalties in a post-COVID world.

To tackle this challenge, businesses need solutions to easily manage employees’ expense and invoice submissions, as well as mitigate compliance risks early. To help companies big and small ensure they are ready to address this, �鶹ԭ�� Concur – together with spend management and risk mitigation partner Oversight – launched . The solution powered by AI (artificial intelligence) is designed to simplify an organisation’s expense audit and compliance programme through embedded intelligence and automation. Concur Detect by Oversight uses AI to automate an enormous quantity of data, enabling it to identify errors early and using predictive analytics to empower finance and compliance teams to take proactive action. The solution provides a range of critical features, including:

Simplified processes: Integrated with the Concur Expense workflow, Concur Detect by Oversight’s AI automatically identifies potential mistakes, fraud, and patterns of misuse both before and after reimbursement.
Mitigated risks: The solution can reimburse employees faster with auto-approval of low-risk items while providing a focus for at-risk items.
Greater visibility and control: Concur Detect by Oversight uses intelligent technologies to detect fraud and anomalies humans can’t. Through its use of AI, it can leverage multiple data points for improved confidence, and validation on financial amounts, dates, vendors, and more.
Ability to improve employee behaviour: The solution helps identify accidental misuse vs. fraud, to help auditors focus on developing and improving policies and best practices.Additionally, Concur Detect also tracks incidents against the employee base. This allows businesses to isolate repeat offenders from users who made innocent mistakes.

Mark Cullen, �� EMEA MD, explains:

“Changing expense needs and unclear policies due to working from home scenarios have further complicated an often slow and error-prone audit process. Concur Detect by Oversight addresses our customers’ audit needs so they can improve compliance, identify fraud, and focus more on what matters to their business. With this solution, businesses can do a solid data analysis and focus on making tailored policy adjustments that address the real causes of expense fraud – rather than making potentially unsuitable policy changes based on mere assumptions.”

��For more information on Concur Detect by Oversight, please .

[1]

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Concur Detect by Oversight: New Solution Tackles Fraud and Non-compliant Expenses Through AI

�鶹ԭ�� News — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 07:55:10 +0000

Simplified processes: Integrated with the Concur Expense workflow, Concur Detect by Oversight’s AI automatically identifies potential mistakes, fraud, and patterns of misuse both before and after reimbursement.
Mitigated risks: The solution can reimburse employees faster with auto-approval of low-risk items while providing a focus for at-risk items.
Greater visibility and control: Concur Detect by Oversight uses intelligent technologies to detect fraud and anomalies humans can’t. Through its use of AI, it can leverage multiple data points for improved confidence, and validation on financial amounts, dates, vendors, and more.
Ability to improve employee behaviour: The solution helps identify accidental misuse vs. fraud, to help auditors focus on developing and improving policies and best practices.Additionally, Concur Detect also tracks incidents against the employee base. This allows businesses to isolate repeat offenders from users who made innocent mistakes.

Pierre-Emmanuel Tetaz, EMEA SVP & General Manager, , explains:

“Changing expense needs and unclear policies due to working from home scenarios have further complicated an often slow and error-prone audit process. Concur Detect by Oversight addresses our customers’ audit needs so they can improve compliance, identify fraud, and focus more on what matters to their business. With this solution, businesses can do a solid data analysis and focus on making tailored policy adjustments that address the real causes of expense fraud – rather than making potentially unsuitable policy changes based on mere assumptions.”

For more information on Concur Detect by Oversight, please .

[1]

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�鶹ԭ�� Concur joins Finance Indaba Network as a Diamond Partner

�鶹ԭ�� News — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 06:45:46 +0000

The expense, invoice and travel management provider will be headlining the Indaba on 15 October

The finance community in South Africa has received an enormous boost with the confirmation of���鶹ԭ�� Concur��as a��Diamond Partner��of the��Finance Indaba Network. The expense, invoice and travel management provider will not only be headlining the all-virtual expo and conference on 15 October, but will also be supporting the Finance Indaba Network for an entire year with insightful webinars, content and engagement.

“The confirmation of �鶹ԭ�� Concur as a Diamond Partner is an incredibly exciting development for the finance community in South Africa,” says��Joel Roerig, managing director of��CFO South Africa. “The Finance Indaba Network provides webinars, podcasts and many more knowledge sharing and networking opportunities – at absolutely no cost to finance professionals. This is only possible thanks to the unwavering support of committed partners like �鶹ԭ�� Concur.”

�鶹ԭ�� Concur is reinventing travel, expense, and invoice management with tools that simplify everyday processes and create better experiences. Its cloud-based service delivers a complete suite of tools to businesses and employees, helping to save money and improve productivity in the office and on the road.

Don’t miss �鶹ԭ�� Concur’s exciting, interactive stand in the virtual exhibition hall, where you can engage with their expense management experts about the solution to your expense management challenges, especially in the disrupted working environments of Covid-19.

The Finance Indaba is Africa’s biggest and best finance event. In 2020, it has spread its wings as the Finance Indaba Network, a community platform for finance professionals that facilitates interaction and engagement the whole year round. Launching on 15 October, the innovative virtual conference and expo will bring together more than 5,000 finance professionals who want to accelerate their knowledge, network and career.

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�鶹ԭ�� Concur’s Angelique Montalto: Avoid the Horror of Wading Through Mountains of Receipts

�鶹ԭ�� News — Fri, 29 May 2020 08:43:37 +0000

�鶹ԭ�� Concur’s cloud-based platform automates much of the previously laborious reporting requirements incumbent on finance departments’ spend management efforts

Under strain from a near-stagnant economy, South African businesses are under pressure to maintain high levels of business productivity while optimising spend across all areas of the business. Due to the increasingly global manner in which most businesses operate, business travel is a growing cost item, putting strain on internal resources who often have to apply time-consuming manual processes to managing travel and expense claims.

Angelique Montalto, regional sales director at �鶹ԭ�� Concur, says the horror of finance teams wading through mountains of paper receipts to update unwieldly spreadsheets is no longer a reality for many businesses. “The cloud-based platform automates much of the previously laborious reporting requirements incumbent on finance departments. With greater visibility over spending than ever before, after and during a trip, and an extensive ecosystem of global partners introducing a constant stream of innovations to the platform, �鶹ԭ�� Concur unlocks greater productivity and cost savings over manual processes.”

Growing cost, complexity of business travel

According to Statista, global business travel spend reached $1.33 trillion in 2017, a figure that’s expected to grow to $1.7 trillion by 2022 (although this projection was made prior to the Covid-19 pandemic).

“With the growing complexity of doing business and the increase in business travel, companies are seeking solutions that can ease and automate paper-based processes to free up valuable internal resources for more high-value work while gaining full visibility over all expenses,” explains Angelique. “This has made tools such as �鶹ԭ�� Concur invaluable to businesses wishing to unlock greater productivity and optimize their spend management.”

�鶹ԭ�� Concur is a cloud-based travel and expense management platform for global businesses that eases and automates many of the travel and expense management activities that put strain on companies’ internal resources. The platform was developed to ease the process of compliance and optimise spend management for businesses around the world.

�鶹ԭ�� Concur enjoys the support of a healthy ecosystem of implementation partners that drive interest and adoption of the platform among local and global businesses. Montalto points to Supply Chain Partner, an experienced �鶹ԭ�� Intelligent Spend Management partner that recently started implementing �鶹ԭ�� Concur to its local and global customer base.

“Partners are critical within the �鶹ԭ�� Concur ecosystem. Aside from driving interest in the market leading solution and managing the implementation process, they provide an invaluable perspective into the reality of spend management optimisation for local, pan-African and global businesses.”

Tools needed to automate, simplify spend management

Schalk Burger, director at��Supply Chain Partner, says managing travel processes within large organisations is difficult, increasing the need for tools that ease and simplify overall spend management.

“We found that �鶹ԭ�� Concur fills a clear gap within the market for managing expense claims in a simple and seamless way. While many spend management solutions are costly and have a lengthy implementation period, �鶹ԭ�� Concur is different in that it offers quick time-to-value and a constant stream of benefits as the solution is implemented.”

Supply Chain Partner is a specialist implementer of supply chain solutions for global companies and was founded in South Africa in 2013. The company is one of the most experienced implementation partners for the �鶹ԭ�� Intelligent Spend Group, with a client list that includes several blue-chip companies in the mining, energy, automotive and financial services industries. The company partnered with �鶹ԭ�� Concur in 2019 and already has a track record of successful projects.

Schalk points to the rise of the Experience Economy as one factor driving uptake in solutions such as �鶹ԭ�� Concur. “It’s no longer just about the customer experience: companies also need to take care of the employee experience to ensure they can continue to attract and retain top talent. This means empowering employees with easy and intuitive self-service solutions that are accessible wherever they go and cut down on manual processes. Travel and expense claim management is an obvious target, as it’s traditionally a very time-consuming and hands-on function within the business. In fact, one survey found that 57 percent of work travelers prefer to book through a single app or tool.”

Building company policy into solution

Angelique adds that managing expense claims is one part of the challenge, but that enforcing company policy is equally important and often very difficult to do in a way that meets the expectations of both the company and the employee. In one survey, more than half of travellers admitted to not always following company policy when traveling.

“One of �鶹ԭ�� Concur’s most powerful features is that companies can build their travel and expense claim policies directly into the solution,” says Angelique. “Corporate and regulatory compliance is managed at the point of impact as opposed to retrospectively. This streamlines the claim process and frees up internal audit resources to focus on more high-value work instead of manually approving or rejecting each claim.”

Schalk agrees:

“One of our recent customers had relied entirely on manual processes. When an employee needed to travel for business, they would search online for a suitable flight, share that with the person responsible for making the booking, and they would then have to manually book the flight or incur the cost of working through a travel management company to make the booking. It was an exhaustive back-and-forth that has been completely eliminated since they implemented �鶹ԭ�� Concur, with the employee able to search for and book the necessary travel arrangements, all aligned with company policy.”

Great partners unlock benefits, reduce complexity

Despite the ease of implementing �鶹ԭ�� Concur and its quick time-to-value, Schalk points out that change management plays an important role in ensuring successful implementations. “For many customers, �鶹ԭ�� Concur may be one of the first cloud-based solutions they implement. In business environments where on-premise solutions are the norm, we find strong change management capabilities invaluable in laying the foundation for moving to a more cloud-based environment.”

One of Supply Chain Partner’s clients, global automotive manufacturer��Scania, attests to this. “The thought process behind Scania South Africa’s decision to transition to �鶹ԭ�� Concur, was to improve process productivity, ensure governance and compliance and to further gain control over all expenses incurred by the business,” says��Angus Kotze, CFO at Scania. “The seamless flow of data received introduces improved levels of transparency into business expenses. The �鶹ԭ�� Concur way of working accelerates this flow of data ��and advances the expense management process holistically.”

He adds that it has been a pleasure working with the team from Supply Chain Partner, as their accessibility and knowledge of the �鶹ԭ�� Concur product has allowed for higher levels of engagement and efficiency during the project implementation phase. ��“They have made each stage of the data gathering, analysis and testing of the project easy to digest and their consistent support has allowed for quick problem solving and turnaround times. The team from Supply Chain Partner have been fantastic to work with and we highly recommend their approach.”

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