Concur Expense now offers native integration with SAP's
enterprise resource planning solution, according to a blog post by SAP Cloud
for Travel and Expense's Henrik Vordenbaeumen, global vice president of product
management for Concur Expense integration, globalization and cards strategy.
The post was dated Sept. 13, the same day Concur announced
it would acquire
Hipmunk, but the integration has been in the works for the better part of
the year.
"The direct connection between Concur and SAP ERP means
that team members will no longer have to manually export and import flat files
to update the ERP," SAP Business Network Group CFO Marc Malone said in a
video published in January. "The moment anything changes in the ERP, that
info will automatically be updated in Concur."
The data that will flow automatically between Concur and SAP
ERP includes expense reports, user profiles, invoices and cash advances, thus
providing managers "timely visibility" into spend within either software,
according to the post.
The promotion made implementation sound easy: Clients download
the integration software from SAP, run the setup wizard, then allow their IT
and finance departments to "map the data between Concur and SAP ERP."
A master data-replication process follows, Malone said in the video. "In a
few hours, the company's data will automatically start flowing between Concur
and SAP ERP."
Concur plans to release a similar integration
between Concur solutions and SAP S/4Hana, SAP's enterprise management cloud
platform, in October. Concur CEO and SAP global managing board member Steve
Singh said in February that native
integration between Concur and SAP S/4Hana would happen this year. In June,
Concur's Scott Torrey—executive vice president and Europe, Middle East and
Africa general manager—said more specifically that the first
round of integrations were scheduled for the third quarter.