Unlocking the Future of Federal Travel and Spend Management

What if the way we pay is costing us more than we think?

In an environment where every dollar must be accounted for, every transaction scrutinized, and every program justified, a fragmented spend management system isn’t just inefficient; it’s risky.

Improper payments, limited visibility into spending, and manual reconciliation efforts consume valuable resources and expose agencies to compliance vulnerabilities. As organizations face mounting pressure to control costs, enhance transparency, and eliminate fraud, the need for a payment strategy that is flexible, scalable, and built for compliance has never been more urgent. But to ensure adoption, this approach should offer the visibility organizations need without locking them into rigid, one-size-fits-all platforms.

Today, a streamlined spend management system is imperative for organizations seeking to control costs, enhance transparency, and mitigate internal fraud, waste, and abuse. As organizations evolve and regulatory landscapes shift, staying agile without forfeiting control and innovation or introducing risk is necessary.

With SAP Concur’s Integrated Travel, Expense, and Payment's solution, organizations can gain critical visibility and control without vendor lock-in including, disrupting existing card programs, or limiting payment choice. This ensures a seamless transition that empowers organizations to meet their operational and strategic goals.

A Unified and Ready T&E Platform for Public Sector

Federal missions depend on people: employees who travel, purchase, and perform work across the country and around the world. Yet the systems supporting these activities often lag far behind.

As agencies evolve in a rapidly changing world, it’s essential to have the right systems, equipped with the tools you need for efficient, safe, and costeffective operations.

Whether it's paying for meals, lodging, incidentals, attending conferences, or traveling for mission related jobs, these expenses that occur in the background are crucial for mission critical success. On average, travel-related spending alone accounts for more than half of the submitted expenses, highlighting the need for a solution that helps employees make smart choices and manage their expenses, while staying within policy, all of which should occur in one system.

Without a robust travel and expense solution that can connect to your organization’s existing finance and HR systems, managing employee spend poses significant challenges.

Limited visibility into travel and expense data across systems makes it hard to enforce policy compliance and detect fraud. It also complicates managing travel budgets and providing duty of care for traveling employees.

Disconnected solutions lack automation and personalization, which increases complexity, raises costs, and frustrates employees. Organizations end up with inefficient audits, travel planning, month-end closings, and reconciliation processes due to scattered data, often resulting in extensive manual work.

This extra effort not only wastes your time but also raises the risk of errors, which can threaten your organization’s financial health and reputation. By contrast, a unified system ensures real-time visibility, structured automation, and secure data flow—all of which strengthen oversight while reducing operational friction.

Beyond T&E: Building a Complete Spend Management Ecosystem

As organizations evolve, the way employees purchase, spend, and report expenses must evolve too. Travel and Expense (T&E) is only one piece of the puzzle. An integrated spend management ecosystem is a strategic move that positions organizations to unify its payment strategy across travel, purchase, and expense.

This means empowering agencies with choice while enhancing their programs with needed oversight. Organizations can keep their financial partners, avoid disruption, and still gain access to AI-powered features, predictive analytics, and seamless integration.

At scale, modernizing spend processes becomes a strategic advantage—improving fiscal stewardship, reducing operational waste, and aligning with federal mandates for transparency and accountability.

The Danger in One-Vendor Dependence

At first glance, a card-centric, standalone payment system may seem like a streamlined solution: one vendor, one platform, one process. But beneath that simplicity lies a web of risks that can erode financial control, operational efficiency, and program sustainability across federal agencies.

Disconnected Systems, Costly Mistakes

Without seamless integration between card charges and travel systems, duplicate or missed payments become a recurring issue. Charges that aren’t automatically matched to vouchers can slip through the cracks, creating reconciliation headaches and increasing the risk of improper payments.

For CFOs and budget officers, the consequences are even more pronounced. Budget inaccuracies arise when unmatched card charges fail to flow into travel systems in real time, obscuring visibility into obligations and outlays. This makes it harder to manage spend proactively and undermines financial planning.

If the risks of a card-centric, standalone system are clear, then the path forward must be equally well-defined. A scalable payment strategy is not just about technology. It must account for resilience and flexibility across a vast ecosystem.

Modernizing Payments with SAP Concur

A fully integrated spend management platform includes travel, expenses, and payment strategy. This eliminates the need for parallel procurements and one-off pilots, saving time, reducing risk, and accelerating modernization.

Unlike standalone payment platforms, SAP Concur embeds payment functionality directly into its core request, travel, and expense workflows. There’s no need to procure a separate payment solution. Instead, organizations can activate features that provide real-time control, structured data, and secure transactions, all within the existing Travel and Expense platform.

This brings real-time visibility into every transaction, policy enforcement at the point of spend, and flexible payment options that adapt to agency needs.

WHAT DOES EMBEDDED PAYMENT ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?

Benefits for the Agencies

An integrated, secure, and compliant payment ecosystem empowers employees, strengthens oversight, and supports the government’s broader goals of transparency, efficiency, and fiscal responsibility. Agencies gain:

• Real-time oversight of travel and purchase activity
• Reduced improper payment risk through structured data and automation
• Simplified reconciliation with direct feeds from Visa, Mastercard, and American Express
• Improved workforce satisfaction with intuitive, mobile-friendly tool
• Greater flexibility to adjust financial partnerships without replacing systems

This means better stewardship of taxpayer funds, stronger compliance, and a more resilient operational environment.

Concur Payments adds card-level controls, virtual payment capabilities, and alternate payment strategies by leveraging partnerships with financial institutions and productivity-enhancing technology, providing several types of alerts as well as direct data feeds to simplify expense reporting and enhance the employee experience with:

• Real-time alerts notifying travelers that a transaction they plan to expense requires additional supporting data.
• In-app alerts notifying travelers as they approach spending limits or consider out-of policy choices.
• Spend data is captured directly from Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to simplify expense reports.

Employees have a seamless payment, travel and expense reporting experience, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing their expenses are compliant and will be processed without delay.

Lessons Learned: The cost of Rigid CardCentric Systems

Over three decades of supporting public-sector organizations, SAP Concur has repeatedly seen agencies forced into expensive, time-consuming system replacements because their previous solutions were built around rigid card program requirements.

These transitions often involve:

• Large-scale retraining
• Workflow disruption
• Costly reimplementation efforts
• Reduced rebates or value over time due to restrictive card models

A Better Way

SAP Concur takes a fundamentally different approach—one built on flexibility, transparency, and government-ready scalability.

Agencies remain in control of their financial relationships, without being locked into minimum balance requirements, mandated credit line usage, or complex reward schemes that may erode value. This ensures continuity, cost efficiency, and the ability to adapt as missions, policies, and leadership priorities evolve.

In addition, system-to-system integration allows for choice of vendor when it comes to other systems, including HR and ERP. This allows direct data flow across the proper system for a transparent view of data of where spend is going. SAP Concur’s flexibility helps protect both productivity and growth.

The Bottom Line

SAP Concur takes a transparent and flexible approach.

Keep control over your financial partnerships without being locked into a specific vendor or specific card program.

This flexibility allows you to adapt your financial relationships as you scale, without disrupting your users or the bottom line.

To explore how SAP Concur can help you build a more agile, compliant, and efficient T&E program tailored to the needs of regulated industries, visit us online or contact your account team.

ABOUT SAP CONCUR SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for integrated and scalable travel, expense, and invoice management solutions.

SOURCES: ¹. Forrester Consulting commissioned by SAP Concur, “Empower The Future of Work with Intelligent Travel and Expense Solutions,” Forrester Consulting, May 2023.