Building the Case for AI Enhanced Expense Automation

Three Australian Customers Share How They Transformed Expense Management with Concur Expense

When finance teams are managing expenses manually or semi-manually, it comes with real costs in time and accuracy: receipts to be added up at month-end, a statutory declaration when one goes missing, or expenses that fall outside policy, or go unaccounted for.

Tom Marland, Principal Solutions Consultant at SAP Concur, hosted an online session about the opportunities and benefits of AI-enhanced expense automation. He was joined by three customers – Belinda Ward, Head of Sales, Wendy Wu Tours; Janna Cottle, Accounts at Aquatec; and Janina Babaic, Business Process Analyst & Concur Administrator, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) – who shared firsthand their insights on how they built the case for change, navigated implementation, and ultimately improved efficiency, visibility, and employee experience across their businesses.

The Hidden Costs of Expense Management

For all three organisations, manual expense management was slowing teams down, taking staff away from the work they do best. At Wendy Wu Tours, Belinda manages 10 sales staff who are constantly out on the road training travel agents and driving new business. This meant accumulating a large number of expenses, which the accounts team was processing through time-intensive manual data entry.

“We were using the time-honoured tradition of Excel spreadsheets,” she said. “Our employees would collect their receipts from their coffees, their lunches, their buying a box of cookies for someone. Then they’d get to the last day of the month with a pile of receipts, and they would manually type the data in Excel – where they spent money, how much they spent – hoping that would add up to what was on their credit card statement. Obviously, there was a lot of human error.”

Things at ANSTO were slightly more advanced – but still quite manual. The finance team had to manage expenses across 2,000 people and 680 credit cards, as well as cash advances and travel requests. While employees were logging expense claims, they were still reliant on manual processes for approvals.

Janina said, “Like Belinda, we had people standing at photocopiers with folders or bags full of receipts from international trips. They had to go through a statutory declaration for a lost receipt. It was laborious and time-consuming. Our finance team was having days of month-end accrual processing – everything was manual. If an approver was away, you couldn’t get anything approved. It was also possible to actually hide credit card expenses, so we had some situations where people made questionable transactions and we had no visibility of them.”

At Janna’s previous place of employment, they faced an additional pain point: some expenses slipping through the cracks entirely. Janna said, “Prior to Aquatec, I worked for a company that didn’t even have an Excel, it was it was all getting handed in manually. And obviously not everybody has a finance background or understands the importance of reconciliation. Costs weren’t getting accounted for at all, until six months later when a huge chunk hits a project and we don’t know what it’s for.”

Each organisation eventually reached a tipping point that led to the realisation they needed a better process. For Belinda, that moment came when she was chasing the sales team for their expenses and they explained that it was taking four to five hours to complete them. “In my head, I’ve got 10 people spending four hours each doing expenses – that’s 40 hours. That’s basically one staff member in Sales I’m missing out on, just by the admin they’re doing,” she said.

ANSTO began looking for a new solution after their old solution was decommissioned. That solution presented itself at an event attended by the CEO, when he witnessed another guest taking a photo of their receipt and uploading it to Concur Expense, which instantly matched it to a credit card expense. “He wanted to know what it was,” Janina commented. “He basically said, ‘Whatever that is, I want it.’"

Making the Case for Automation

Sometimes the biggest barrier to change can be the status quo – that’s why transformation is most effective when it comes from the top down. So when building the business case for expense automation, Belinda knew she had to get the leadership team on board first and foremost.

“I went straight to the top, no mucking about,” she said. “We had a global SLT conference with Wendy Wu herself and the Global CEO. I used some of my presentation to talk about the amount of time my team was wasting on admin – we hire them to talk about our tours, not fill in Excel spreadsheets. So when I explained it from a productivity standpoint, it was pretty easy to get it across the line. Once you get it across the line with Wendy herself, it gets signed off on.”

While agreeing that the key stakeholder is the CEO, Janina emphasised the importance of getting IT and HR teams involved so they can take ownership of the change. ANSTO also worked with an implementation partner to ensure a successful transition. She said, “That was a real game changer, it set us up for success. We didn’t want to create another legacy system or just set-and-forget – we wanted something that would grow with us. Our partner team was able to encourage and train us, and give us lots of support.”

Building a solid business case required identifying key capabilities and evaluating different market solutions against them. For Wendy Wu Tours, simplicity was essential. Belinda said, “We salespeople like things to be straightforward when it comes to expenses. What I was looking for was the ability to take the photo of the receipt on their phone and it happens right then and there – we don’t lose it. We needed to be able to link the system to our corporate credit cards, to give us visibility over any lost receipts, and link the receipt to the expense.”

Belinda also prioritised a user-friendly layout for approvals. “In the good old Excel days, I’d have to wade through 10 pages of PDFs to try and find the receipt. For the guys on the ground, ease of use was a core benefit – the system had to make their lives easier.”

That convenience was a deciding factor at ANSTO as well. Janina said, “Mobility was important – being able to do it all in the mobile app while on the road. Another big thing was the return to our finance team, because our end-of-month accrual process was taking days and that was impacting on financial planning.”

And for Aquatec, it came back to making sure every cost was properly tracked. Janna said, “We were just looking for a system that was going to make all cardholders accountable for their spend, and allowed us to clearly see what was outstanding. No one likes unexpected surprises at the end of the month.”

Building Momentum, One Step at a Time

Change doesn’t happen overnight. According to Janna, Aquatec set realistic expectations for the process rollout and waited for momentum to build.

“The first month, we hoped for the best,” she said. “I’m not sure even one employee submitted a claim in Concur in the first 4 weeks, but we were expecting that. After 8 weeks, we probably had about 50% of staff start using Concur – again that was expected. People started to realise this is here to stay. Then probably around 12 weeks in, we had about 98% of staff on board. About six months into it, everything was running smoothly. My involvement in helping staff process the claims significantly dropped; it was working really well.”

In the leadup to deployment, ANSTO invested a significant amount of time into helping their team gain practical experience in using the new solution. Janina explained, “We did a lot of one-on-ones. We had key stakeholders – including our group general managers and their executive assistants – come in and do workshops, so they could get their hands on it before it actually rolled out. We had certain service desks set up to do first-level calls. We’ve got a diverse age group at ANSTO so it’s a real pinch-me moment to see someone succeed in using the app and setting up expenses.”

Clear communication was key: once people understood the benefits, they were much more likely to get on board with the change. “They were going to get all this time back from doing their expenses,” Janina said. “They didn’t have to send out a photocopy and take receipts. They didn’t have to do lost receipt declarations external to the system because that’s built into Concur Expense. It prompts them for what they need to do. So when I look back on it, it was a lot of work but it set us up for success.”

At Wendy Wu Tours, the process began with an introduction for the sales team and finance team together in a room, to make sure everyone was on the same page. Belinda said, “Like any change, some of my team ran with it from day one which was fantastic, and then there was a bit of resistance from some of the others. But by the end of the month, it was pretty apparent why I had expenses from certain people and not from others – we had that discussion and it got everyone over the line.”

Belinda also took an incremental approach to implementation, with a phased rollout that introduced changes gradually. “We did it in parts: initially we just used it for our company credit card and other expenses could go on an Excel spreadsheet. That lasted 3 months and then I asked for all expenses to be submitted through Concur Expense – by that time, everyone was in. It’s also leading by example, so when I was out on the road with the team, they’d see me taking photos of my receipts.”

Tips for a Successful Rollout

Plan for the future, not just for today. “The first thing is to look at your business, not just from a now standpoint, but for where you want to go and the company’s going to grow to,” Janna from Aquatec said. “If it’s all set up from the beginning, then in 12 months when you want to go in a specific direction, you won’t be asking what else you need to set up to make that happen. It’s very important to look at the long-term.”

Engage early to surface pain points. “We engaged with a key group of people before we implemented Concur,” Janina from ANSTO said. “We were in the process of implementing it and we wanted to know what their pain points were. Even if we couldn’t address them this time, what we’ve found with Concur is that it isn’t a legacy system – it grows with us. So when we make a change, like updating an audit rule or expense type, then it’s still addressing those pain points that we had.”

Drive adoption from day one. “It’s getting them using it straight away,” Belinda from Wendy Wu Tours said. “This is one of those systems that you can’t break. You may as well have a go because it’s going to be better than what you were doing previously. If you end up with the receipt in there three times, we’ll teach you how to take it back out.”

Educate and support your people. “Provide training to make people feel comfortable, so they’re not overwhelmed,” Janna said. Belinda added, “We had constant follow up and support in our weekly meetings, just asking general questions: ‘How are people going with Concur? Anyone got any problems? Has anyone discovered anything they want to share with the group?’”

Harnessing the Power of AI

Recent research and industry trends highlight that AI is quickly moving from a ‘nice to have’ to an expectation in finance. Organisations that invest in automation and AI-driven tools are able to do more with less, improving traditional expense processes that otherwise place a heavy burden on employees.

Concur Expense is an AI-enabled expense management solution. Concur ExpenseIt, for example, uses AI, machine learning, and optical character recognition (OCR) technology to pull details like amounts, dates, and vendor names from a photo of the receipt. This eliminates manual data entry and receipt handling, minimising the risk of human error. Belinda commented, “Previously we were retyping everything – now no one’s having to go through and switch around the 8 and 9 because it should have been 89 cents instead of 98 cents. We know it’s correct, we don’t have to check it. So it’s the accuracy and the time factor that I love.”

Concur AI tools like Expense Assistant and Request Assistant automatically add and categorise expenses, and provide intelligent cost estimates for a trip. Janna pointed out that these capabilities translate into greater convenience for staff who travel. “They get out of an Uber and, while they’re sitting at the airport, they just take photos of their receipts and they’re uploaded. It saves a lot of time and avoids worrying about misplacing receipts.”

SAP Concur’s solutions – including Concur Expense, Concur ExpenseIt, Concur Request, and Business Intelligence – are designed to automate and streamline expense management. Built-in AI capabilities are transforming what used to be a slow, error-prone chore into a seamless, automatic process that is fast, accurate, and transparent.

Turning Data into Intelligent Reporting

AI helps power Business Intelligence, the reporting and data analytics platform that unifies travel, expense, and invoice data into a single, comprehensive view. Janina said, “We’re using Business Intelligence for our reporting tool, and just having the enriched data with AI writing reports for you – it makes it so easy for users.”

She described how, rather than being a set-and- forget system, the platform has built-in flexibility so it can be customised according to business needs. “Over time we’ve added different things to it, because different situations have occurred – whether it’s fringe benefits tax or team members or questions on notice to parliament. We’ve been able to change expense types to then drive other reporting or enhanced data or behaviours by employees. Because Concur Expense remembers the last time we used a merchant or if you put something against an expense type, it’s educating the users as they go.”

Aquatec is leveraging these reporting tools to improve process efficiencies. Janna said, “It’s been great for viewing transactional data. As part of our month-end process, we rely heavily on the expense accrual report. It has been an excellent safety net, making it easy to track and accrue for the costs that are not yet reconciled. We can also review individual expenses, identifying things going under the radar that aren’t actually business expenses – so from that, we’re able to rewrite our travel and policy procedure and distribute that out to the company.”

ANSTO has similarly found Business Intelligence to be invaluable for all types of reporting across the organisation. Janina said, “We have reports that go out to our business units, that include all the outstanding expenses and the days aged. We also send the group executives the reports of our travel requests, as well as the requests expected to happen in the next 12 months. We do a daily reconciliation, generating a report from Concur Expense not only for our credit spend, which then offsets against the vendor and T&E clearing account, but also the accrual. We’ve got some pretty nifty middleware: the accrual report comes in, and we can run a reconciliation to make sure our general ledger account in our SAP ERP and Concur Expense are reconciled every day.”

With large spends of up to half a million dollars a month, ANSTO’s accounts team was previously spending hours at month-end trying to reconcile outstanding amounts. Janina said, “Now I reconcile our general ledger every day and it generally takes less than 10 minutes through Business Intelligence. We also do things like personal mileage reports that come out once a month – they’re building that every month as it goes, instead of the huge amount of work that payroll had to do at the end of the year. We have seminars and conferences that need breakdown and allocation against the cost centre. With Business Intelligence, there’s no surprises.”

For Belinda and the finance team at Wendy Wu Tours, this has led to much faster, easier, and more accurate reporting. “Those reports used to take quite a while to come through to me, but I can pretty much get a solution straight away. That’s why our finance team have been really big advocates for using the system.”

The platform’s advanced reporting capability also has advantages from a leadership perspective. Janna said, “If a manager, director, or someone from the board wants a report, it can be downloaded within minutes and they can have all the data they need.”

Unlocking Surprising Benefits

While all three Concur customers anticipated an uplift in efficiency, AI-enhanced expense automation had some unexpected benefits as well. “I was just blown away by the mobility,” Janina said. “I thought we would get some pushback from our users – ‘I didn’t have Wi-Fi’ or ‘I shouldn’t have to use my own phone’ – but there was only a little resistance from a few people. We could give them options, so if they didn’t have Wi-Fi they could send the photo through a verified email at ExpenseIt.com and still get the same outcome. The mobility in approving and submitting expenses was just a pleasant surprise.”

For Janna, her previous employer had another a-ha moment when they realised they had granular visibility. Janna said, “I remember the first month at my old workplace, I sent the figures to the CFO and got a response saying it was wrong – but it was actually correct. It showed that when things were being done manually, they weren’t getting processed or accounted for correctly. It was a very big shock, but a good one, because we knew that implementing Concur Expense was definitely a benefit.”

Belinda said the biggest win was the ease created by the platform – and the time saved as a result. “I didn’t realise until we started using the system that I could just email other receipts to Concur Expense, for example when I booked a flight. That was a game changer as well; it could do even more than I realised it could, and we’re probably still just scratching the surface. I’m saving a lot of time.”

Janina singled out SAP Concur’s partner ecosystem as one of its strongest features. She said, “Being able to have CabCharge, Uber for Business, and some hotel platforms as extended partners within Concur Expense and having e-receipts flow through – it becomes so easy, whereas before we used to complete these separately through a manual process. Now we’ve got real data rather than having to go to multiple systems to try and reconcile what we’ve got.”

Having access to detailed spend data also helps organisations achieve their sustainability targets, by allowing them to track carbon emissions in a meaningful way. Janina said, “Some of the sustainability partners that you can extend with – it’s not just numbers on a page, it’s actually real- world figures that you can attribute to something. Rather than just saying ‘Our sustainability was X percent’, you can see the breakdown of what that actually means.”

From Visibility to Business-Wide Impact

Once Concur Expense was in place, the impact showed up in some clear, practical ways. At Wendy Wu Tours, an obvious sign of how well employees had adapted to Concur Expense was how quickly they agreed to submit their expenses by the second day of the month instead of the fifth, as had been the norm.

Belinda said, “If this had been our old system, and I’d said that I need them on the second day, all hell would have broken loose. But there was not a murmur, not a complaint. Because the system is so easy, they’re so up-to-date with their expenses that they’re not doing a scramble on the last day. It just shows how easy it is for them, and how they’re seeing it as beneficial.”

For Janina, Concur Expense’s automation capabilities not only save her time-consuming manual labour, but they encourage behavioural change across the business. She said, “When someone gets a new credit card expense, they receive an email notification – previously, I would have done that all manually but now it’s automated through Concur Expense on the 15th of the month. That visibility drives a lot of change, because it prompts them to go in and look at whether they recognise the expense.”

Because ANSTO had previously struggled with a large number of expense types, the business had overcorrected by having too few categories – another problem that Concur Expense fixed. “We were able to change expense types according to what the finance team needed. Being able to have those different forms and fields within the expense type meant that we were able to get that enriched data we were after,” Janina said.

Janna agreed that Concur Expense’s ability to capture every type of expense was a major value- add. She said, “It’s having a system that works for every department, not just finance. So each department might have different information they need to be able to run their reports – we were able to set that up within Concur Expense. It’s just held everyone accountable for their transactions and expenses, and for reconciling them.”

For all three organisations, this granular level of visibility has contributed to more informed decision-making across the business more broadly. As Janina remarked, “You didn’t know what you didn’t know before. Being able to see everything just makes it completely different.”

What’s more, Concur Expense has helped finance teams uncover some hidden costs that they weren’t aware of previously: transactions put through the system with the wrong receipt attached, and items logged that should have been personal expenses. “With Concur Expense, you can run but you can’t hide,” Janina laughed. “We’ve got full visibility, and you just can’t get away with that.”

The end result is that employees take greater accountability and ownership over their expenses, knowing that it will be fully transparent to the finance team. Belinda admitted, “I’ll be the first one to say, when I used to see an expense form and have to go through 10 pages, sometimes I couldn’t be bothered and I just signed off. Whereas now, I look at it and make sure – I’ve become much better and so has my team. It’s keeping everyone accountable because there’s total visibility: the receipt goes into the system, matches your credit card, we’re done.”

Advice for Finance Leaders

Belinda, Janina, and Janna were asked what advice they would give to a finance leader still managing expenses manually or with legacy processes. 

Janina’s response: “I would be asking, ‘Why?’ You won’t look back. It will have some short- term pain, but you’ll have long-term gain.”

Belinda said, “There’s a solution out there that saves you time! For me, it’s a no-brainer. Now that we do it, whenever I’m speaking to other people in the industry, I ask what they use for their expenses. If they don’t use Concur Expense, I tell them they should.”

Janna agreed that the benefits of switching to Concur Expense were well worth the time and effort it takes for implementation. “Make the change,” she said. “You’re not going to regret it.”