SAP Concur has launched a new budgeting tool that is more
"comprehensive, accessible, flexible, better integrated" and available
on mobile, unlike the T&E company's existing Budget Insight tool, VP of
product management Jessica Staley told BTN. Budget Insight will be phased out
in about a year, Staley said, adding, "Concur has taken huge leaps forward
to making data visible and mobile" since the older product hit the market
several years ago.
While Budget Insight was targeted towards enterprise-size
clients and, therefore, users of SAP Concur's Professional version, the new Budget is available for both Professional and Standard versions for a fee.
"This is clearly a universal business need," Staley said.
According to the company, Budget allows a manager
to establish the budget within Concur by uploading a spreadsheet of his or her
budget or by connecting to any enterprise resource planning tool through an application
programming interface.
The new tool also ingests more data sets compared with the
travel request and expense data feeds that go into Budget Insight. Concur
expense, travel, invoice, purchase requests and travel requests data feed into
Budget. "As a result, finance leaders and project managers can
see how spending unfolds to make informed decisions and effectively manage
budgets," according to a blog post by Staley.
Bottom-Up Control
Traditional budget tools, Staley said, are aimed at a CFO
and perhaps a few senior finance users, "but beyond that, it rapidly
trails off, where all the budget owners at a company are getting a spreadsheet
from finance once a quarter or maybe a month, if they're lucky."
By giving access to more users, Budget allows
higher level managers to provide spend visibility and budget controls to lower
level managers, which results in company savings. "When companies look to
cost-saving measures, a big concept now is … to push control further down in
the organization so more people are empowered to see where they stand and make
better decisions that cumulatively are going to roll up and impact the
financials," Staley explained.