SAP Concur

Review by eFreeware

Most expense apps try to be everything to everyone. SAP Concur does the opposite: it is a companion for people whose employer already runs Concur Travel, Concur Expense or Concur Invoice, and it assumes that account exists before you open it. That single fact shapes everything else about the app, from what it can do to who should bother installing it.

If your workplace puts business trips and reimbursement through Concur, this is the piece that lets you deal with them from an Android phone rather than a desk. If it does not, there is nothing here for you to sign into. SAP SE has kept the app free, with no ads and no in-app purchases, and it carries a 4.6 average from more than 121,000 ratings.

The app dates back to June 2010, which says something about how long corporate travel and expense workflows have been running through phones. What I find worth noting is the scope: it covers approving, booking, receipt capture and mileage, which are the four jobs that most often interrupt a workday when you are away from a computer.

Approvals and reports without a laptop

The first job is the one managers feel most: reviewing and approving expense reports, invoices and travel requests. Instead of waiting until you are back at a desk, the app puts those decisions in front of you while they are still fresh. For anyone who signs off on a team's spending, that is the core of the app.

Receipts are the second half of the same job. You photograph a receipt and it goes straight onto an expense report, which removes the stage where paper accumulates in a jacket pocket until the end of the month. I would expect this to matter most to people who travel often enough that receipts pile up faster than they can file them.

Mileage gets similar treatment: the app captures and tracks it automatically rather than asking you to reconstruct distances later. Taken together, these three features cover the parts of expense filing that people most often postpone, which is a sensible place for a phone app to concentrate.

Booking trips and keeping the itinerary straight

The app also handles the booking side. Flights, rail, hotels and cars can all be booked from the phone. Because it works inside the same Concur account your company uses, the trip you book is the trip that lands in your expense records rather than something you have to re-enter afterward.

Hotel suggestions are based on the preferences already stored in your profile, which is a small feature that saves a repetitive search each time you plan a stay. Meeting invites get attention too: you can add new attendees or update the ones already on an invite, useful when plans shift after a trip is booked.

TripIt integration brings travel alerts and updates, according to the developer. For anyone juggling connecting flights and hotel check-ins, having alerts in the same place as the booking is the appeal. I would treat the alerting as a convenience layered on top of the itinerary rather than a separate travel assistant.

What you need before it does anything

The developer states plainly that this companion app is meant for existing SAP Concur users.

That requirement is not a flaw so much as the whole premise. A freelancer filing a handful of receipts a year, or a small team that tracks expenses in a spreadsheet, has no reason to install it. The app is built for the employee inside a company that has already made Concur the system of record.

The most recent update adds full support for Android 16, the current version of Google's mobile operating system. If you are on a recent Android phone, that is the kind of maintenance you want to see rather than a feature list. The app is listed in the Business category and rated for Everyone.

Where it fits in a working week

The clearest fit is someone who travels for work regularly and whose company runs Concur. Booking, receipt capture, mileage and itinerary alerts all happen in the gaps of a trip, and a phone is the device actually in your hand during those gaps. Managers who approve requests benefit for a different reason: decisions stop waiting for a return to the office.

It also suits people who handle invoices as part of their role, since invoice review and approval sit alongside the expense tools. What ties these users together is not job title but the fact that their employer has already standardized on Concur.

Whether the app is useful to you is decided entirely by whether your workplace uses the platform behind it. Five million-plus installs suggests a large number of people fall into that group.

A companion worth having if your office runs Concur

SAP Concur is a well-established, narrowly focused tool, and it is honest about that. It does not try to be a personal finance tracker or a general travel planner. It takes the expense and travel tasks your employer already routes through Concur and makes them doable from an Android phone, which is exactly what a companion app should do.

I would recommend it to employees and approvers at organizations that use Concur Travel, Expense or Invoice. The combination of receipt capture, automatic mileage, in-app booking and TripIt itinerary alerts covers the practical side of a business trip without much friction. The 4.6 average across a large number of ratings suggests that this audience finds it dependable.

If your company does not use Concur, the app has nothing to connect to and no reason to be on your phone. For everyone else, it is a free, ad-free extension of a system they already have to use, and that is a straightforward proposition.

What's new in version 10.36.0

NEW FEATURES • Now providing full support for users of Android 16 (API 36), the latest mobile OS from Google.