Monitoring credit card spend – Concur

Case study: Where expense management systems fall short

Corporate credit card spend is a critical financial control

In most corporations, policy is the foundation of financial control. Yet many expense management systems, like Concur, cannot implement all policy controls as hard controls, and instead rely on soft controls like manager approval as the primary safeguard.

In practice, this creates friction. Managers balancing competing priorities and working to tight deadlines will often approve expenses in bulk. Without timely context or full visibility of the spend, it means thorough validation is unrealistic, especially weeks after the expense occurs.

As a result, corporate credit card spend and approval becomes procedural rather than protective, increasing organisational risk.

These increased control risks include:

Policy exceptions

Out-of-policy expenses, whether accidental or intentional, are more

likely to be approved.

Misclassified Spend

Personal or non-compliant costs may be coded as business expenses and

pass through unchecked.

Undetected Patterns

Expenses are reviewed in isolation, making repeat policy breaches

difficult to identify.

Improving controls around credit cards through Verify

Approval-based controls aren’t failing because of managers — they’re limited by manual review and point-in-time checks rather than continuous, intelligent oversight.

Satori was asked by a client using Concur to implement our automated financial monitoring software Verify, to review their processes around their corporate card and expense processes, and improve financial controls moving forward.

What the Verify review found:

Policy breaches:

263 breaches identified with a spend amount of $11 million

Employee interventions:

150 employees counselled, five faced disciplinary action for their repeated policy violations.

Personal expense

monitoring:

over $10 million in personal expenses tracked to ensure transparency

and accountability in claims.

Financial recoveries:

savings of over $380,000 achieved through detection of overpayments and duplicate payments.

The below table highlights what we identified following one year of reviewing the client's credit card and expenses processes using Verify. All issues that they had previously been unaware of.

The value delivered by Verify

By implementing Verify by Satori, this customer transformed spending from a reactive, trust-based model into a proactive, data-driven one. Not only were they able to rectify past issues, by automating the monitoring processm they fundamentally reshaped how compliance is enforced across their organisation.

Drove behavioural change with spend on personal expenses reducing by 95%

Ensured policy assurance with a significant reduction of policy breaches

Enabled strategic growth by identifying inefficient spend and reallocating funds to higher-value initiatives

Reinforced accountability by embedding a culture of financial accountability among staff and managers

The end result?

The client has improved financial controls and operational efficiency.

The significant recoveries delivered a strong ROI around the software and processes. The quality improvements to the client's audit processes and data quality improvements has enhanced cost control across corporate credit card and expenses, reducing the risks of errors, fraud and policy breaches, and improving governance and oversight.