For many enterprise finance leaders, rolling out SAP Concur represents a major control achievement. Policies are live. Approval workflows are in place. From a governance perspective, that is a significant step forward.
But workflow control is only one piece of the puzzle. It also creates the foundation for a more important question: what does complete control look like once spend moves beyond approval?
In SAP Concur environments with decentralised teams and mixed payment methods, control tends to slip after approval – spend takes place on personal cards or through disconnected payment processes. At that point, control is no longer being enforced in real time.
Finance is left to resolve issues retrospectively rather than shaping spend as it occurs. A dynamic that sits at the heart of the control blind spot. The consequences go beyond compliance risk, affecting forecasting, reporting confidence and the ability to maintain control across entities and cost centres.
Where workflow control needs to go further
The problem often becomes visible once businesses move beyond a simple, centralised card model. When teams use a combination of payment methods, policy leakage becomes harder to prevent, and out-of-policy spend is addressed after the money has been spent rather than before.
The transition between approval and payment is more significant than it may appear. When payment processes are not linked to approvals, transactions only become visible after the month ends, making forecasting less precise. Finance ends up chasing receipts and correcting coding, turning month-end into a reactive, resource-heavy clean-up exercise. Across multiple entities, disconnected payment processes make it even harder to build a consolidated view.
Half of finance teams (50%) take six business days or more to close, while reconciliation can consume 20 to 50 hours a month. In addition, 7.4% of expense report line items are exceptions. While seemingly innocuous, these statistics suggest that finance teams are spending too much time fixing data and not enough time using it.
A break in control is a strategic issue
This is the point at which the control gap stops being an operational improvement and becomes a strategic priority.
Finance teams that have invested in governance can still end up in reactive mode, weakening their ability to be forward-looking. Over three-quarters of CFOs (78%) say freeing up strategic focus is a top priority, while 64% of finance teams say they frequently have to react to changing situations. Around half (46%) say finance processes create friction with functional teams.
Finance leaders lose time that could be spent on higher-value work. Forecasting becomes harder because data arrives too late, and audit confidence weakens because the data trail is incomplete.
The ramifications extend beyond finance. When employees pay for business expenses out of pocket and wait for reimbursement, the finance workflow becomes an employee experience issue as well. Around 40% of employees want easier access to company money to improve productivity, while 43% say finance delays have slowed their work or delayed projects.
Completing the control loop in SAP Concur
SAP Concur governs workflow, and that is both valuable and necessary. But governance is strongest when it extends beyond approval. Without that continuity, finance receives a workflow record, but not always a complete control outcome.
This is where the next layer of control comes in. Rather than adding more process, Soldo helps complete the control loop within an existing SAP Concur environment.
The principle is simple: keep approval and payment connected, apply policy before spending occurs and return transaction data to SAP Concur with the context needed for reporting and reconciliation.
That creates a more practical lens for evaluating control. Where does policy stop? Where does payment sit outside the workflow? And where is finance still having to correct spend long after the payment has happened?
If those questions are difficult to answer, it’s worth investigating three areas:
- If approval and payment stay connected
- If spending is visible quickly enough to support accurate forecasting
- If controls scale across entities, cost centres and teams
