From Reactive Expense Reporting to Strategic T&E Visibility

Key Takeaways:

• To gain control of your company’s expenditures, capturing the expenses is not enough. You must understand your expenses.

  
  

• Expense controls must be proactive, not reactive.

  
  

• Your expense reporting will only be as good as the entry system. Poor input equals poor output.

The Problem

For years, Foundry Commercial knew its largest operating expense category, travel and entertainment. Accounting could see the totals each month. What they could not see was the story behind the spending.

The reporting answered one question, “how much did we spend?”

It did not answer the questions leadership actually needed.

· Why was the money spent?

· Which activities produced it?

· Which trips supported revenue?

· Which expenses supported internal operations?

The data existed. The insights did not.

Free-form expense descriptions created thousands of slightly different explanations for the same activity. One employee wrote “client meeting.” Another wrote “prospect visit.” Someone else wrote “business development.” Finance had totals, but the reasons behind the spending were fragmented across inconsistent descriptions.

At the same time, the CEO issued a clear mandate, reduce expenses. However, without understanding the drivers behind travel spend, any reduction strategy would rely on guesswork. The company needed visibility, not simply totals.

The realization.

Two structural problems were creating the gap:

First, travel booking and expense reporting lived in separate worlds. Employees booked travel through multiple channels. The expense system only recorded the reimbursement afterward. The reporting was reactive.

Second, business purpose data lacked structure. Employees described the purpose of an expense in free text. That created noise instead of insight.

The finance team could measure spending, but they could not measure the intent.

The turning point.

If travel and entertainment represented the largest discretionary expense category, it needed to move from after-the-fact reporting to managed spending.

The solution required two changes:

Integrate travel booking into the expense ecosystem.

Standardize the reason behind every expense.

The implementation.

We were using a different expense system at the time, but said system was not set up to capture the detail we needed. After careful review, we decided to move to SAP

Concur for two reasons:

Integrated travel allowing us to control the travel offerings

Customizable expense forms where we could control the input

The SAP Concur rollout created the foundation.

Travel booking moved into the same environment as expense reporting. Flights, hotels, and car rentals now entered the system at the moment of booking. Finance gained visibility before the expense occurred, not weeks afterward. We also replaced free-form explanations with structured business purpose selections.

Instead of writing anything in a blank field, employees now select from a defined list of business purposes and sub-purposes.

Examples include:

• Annual Events (with actual event names in the sub-purpose)

• Prospective client meeting

• Employee Related with sub-categories

• Professional Association MembershipsConference

• General Business/other

• Business Development

Each expense now carries a standardized intent. This single change transformed reporting.

Finance can now answer questions that were previously impossible.

Is our travel helping to generate revenue (are deals being closed)?

How much are we spending on flights or hotels for a specific event?

Where can we start to cut costs on travel?

Which offices generate the highest client-related travel?

Which activities drive the largest T&E costs?

The outcome.

• Expense reporting shifted from reactive reimbursement to proactive insight.

• Leadership can now see how much teams spend and why they spend it.

• Leaders see travel patterns clearly.

• Teams measure the business activity behind every expense.

Cost reduction conversations rely on data instead of assumptions. The SAP Concur rollout was not only a system implementation.

We shifted from recording expenses to understanding them.

Let's talk about how I can help

If your organization can see what it spends but not why, there are likely opportunities hiding inside your expense data.

Explore Marvin’s insights or schedule a 1:1 conversation to see how greater visibility can drive smarter financial decisions.