Asking the Experts About…Audit Best Practices
Concur Audit enables businesses to enforce policy holistically, which improves compliance while saving time and money.
But how can you be sure you’re following best practices?
Our Ask an Expert: Audit webinar can help. In a series spread across four webinars about SAP Concur solutions, these 30-minute sessions provide invaluable insights by sitting down with topic experts and picking their brains to make sure you’re getting the most out of your solution.
We’ve highlighted some key strategic considerations from the webinar that will ensure your business is staying compliant and will have the most effective policy.
How Concur Audit Improves Compliance
In order to find out if you’re employees are following policy with their expenditure, it’s recommended that you audit 100% of spend as this will identify any non-compliance. As Emily Gosling, Audit Consultant – Enterprise, SAP Concur explained, “it’s really important that spend is reviewed to make sure there’s no leakage and that employees are being compliant.”
As employees use Concur Audit to claim on their expenses, your business will gather enough data to highlight trends on employee spending behaviours so you can take action on repeat offenders. For example, you will be able to see every time an employee has had their claim rejected, as well as seeing the reason for the rejection.
The best place to position Audit to review your expenditure is after the claim has been submitted, but before it is sent to the line manager for approval. As Emily stated, “there are multiple reasons behind this. For example, if a discrepancy is found, we can send the report back to the end-user for amendment, helping to drive change in your user behaviour. Secondly, the report will only ever be presented to the line manager with accurate data and the line manager’s time is used effectively. The only ask of them is to check it’s a genuine business cost.”
Does Your Policy Cover All Bases?
To ensure employees are following best practices, there are some things to consider when building your policy, or perhaps modifying or updating one already in place.
Within your Travel policy, it’s important to be specific when it comes to hotels and accommodation. Include things like laundry service charges and setting out what (if any) personal expenses are included while employees are travelling for business. This is also relevant for airfare. Consider re-imbursement for non-ticket expenses such as:
- Business or First-Class seating
- Additional baggage fees
- Airline club membership
- Inflight meal
For categories such as car rental and ground transport, state what extras are included (for example, navigation system or car seat) and decide what car maintenance you will provide. Clarify which cars are acceptable for rental and which aren’t, and decide whether you will provide simultaneous car mileage and car rental expense. It’s also important to be clear on what happens with fines and driving infractions, and to be exact about insurance options.
The ‘other’ category on expenditure claims can be elusive. If your policy doesn’t clearly define exactly what falls under this category and what doesn’t, it can be taken advantage of. Consider items such as:
- Unauthorised childcare expenses
- Personal expenses such as personal hygiene or tobacco
- Lost or stolen items
- Late credit card fees
By following these best practices, you can be confident that your employees are following a clear policy that they will be able to understand. You can also set rules within the Audit service to remind employees of the policy at the time the claim is submitted, therefore avoiding overspend on claims as well as clamping down on non-compliant spend.
Use a Third-Party to Audit Your Claims
Concur Audit provides a team of trained auditors who will check 100% of your claims. As Emily mentioned, “having an external review in place won’t just reduce the time that you spend internally assessing claims, it also provides reassurance that your claims are being reviewed on a non-bias approach.”
The service helps capture and prevent any non-compliant expenditure through receipts, policies, and VAT checks. As Sebastian Pestridge, Global Account Manager, SAP Concur pointed out, “the Audit Team do carry out VAT checks, with the starting criteria in the UK and Australia, for those on our standard platform. Additionally, Germany, France and India for the professional platform. We can also incorporate checks for other countries, if on the professional platform but this will only be a report on errors, unlike our other countries where we make changes on behalf of the customer.”
End-users can communicate with the Audit Support Team at any time, meaning if your business has offices in multiple countries, you won’t have to worry about time zones. There are many ways in which the Audit Support Team can be contacted, as Emily confirmed, “via email, which is probably the quickest route for end-users. When the email is sent to say your claim has been rejected and this is the reason why, there is a link to the email address they can contact there. We do have a phone line, a chat line and support cases they can utilise.”
Make the Most of Your SAP Concur Solutions
Once your business applies these processes and has a policy that is easy to use, you can be confident that compliance will improve, which will save you money in the long run.
To find out more best practices, tips, and tricks, and get answers to audit-related questions, register now for the Ask an Expert: Audit webinar.
