Automated rate compliance, run for you.
The calculation is required. The maintenance isn't. SAP Concur runs allowable-vs-unallowable rate compliance as a managed service — no more IT tickets, no legacy code to update.
Every government contractor has to separate allowable cost from unallowable, meal by meal and trip by trip. Most build that logic in-house and then spend years maintaining it. Hand us the code and get your engineers back on mission work.
● Written to Standard Accounting Extract → ERP
● Logic documented and reviewable
Transparent, documented calculation logic replaces custom code nobody can fully explain.
Fires on report submission. No manual policy checks, no rate lookups, no traveler judgment calls.
24/7 monitoring, on-call developers, and life-cycle maintenance included in the service.
You are already paying for this calculation. The line item just isn't labeled.
Under Cost Accounting Standards and FAR Part 31, allowable cost has to be separated from unallowable — every business meal, every trip, every attendee. There is no version of your business where this doesn't get done. The only open question is who does it and what it costs you.
It's a regulatory requirement
Not a best practice, not an efficiency play. If you hold government contracts, the calculation happens — correctly, or expensively.
The rates move every year
CONUS per diem rates reset with the federal fiscal year. OCONUS rates move more often. Whatever runs your calculation has to be updated on that clock, forever.
The audit arrives years later
DCAA can ask you to defend a calculation long after the person who wrote the logic has moved on. Every report has to be airtight the day it's filed.
So the question was never whether to run rate compliance.
It's whether your IT team should be the ones maintaining it.
Most government contractors answered that question a decade ago, when there wasn't another option. There is now.
Most contractors are sitting in the middle column.
It was the right call when it was made. It has quietly become the most expensive of the three.
Spreadsheets and manual review
Someone in finance checks each report against policy and looks up the rate by hand.
- No build cost
- Scales only by adding headcount
- Error rate rises with volume
- Hard to evidence consistently in audit
Custom code inside IT
A functional extension was built years ago to automate the calculation. It works — until something changes.
- Every policy change is an IT ticket
- Rate updates compete with the roadmap
- Usually one person truly understands it
- You own the logic in the audit
A service, not a codebase
The calculation runs inside the platform your travelers already use, maintained by the people who built it.
- Policy changes are configuration
- Rate maintenance is on us
- Monitored 24/7, developers on call
- Documented logic you can hand an auditor
- 01Black-box logicThe extension calculates rates in ways nobody currently on your team can fully explain. That's technical debt with audit exposure attached.
- 02Developer time you didn't plan forEvery rate change, policy revision, and platform update pulls engineers off mission work and onto accounting logic.
- 03Key-person riskThe person who wrote it is one resignation away from taking the only complete mental model of your compliance calculation with them.
- 04Errors that surface too lateMistakes appear downstream — in the ERP, at close, or during an audit — when they're expensive to unwind and awkward to explain.
- 05Judgment pushed onto travelersEmployees apply accounting rules they were never trained on. Who counts as a guest, which attendees are allowable — decided by someone who books travel for a living.
- 06No visibility in flightFinance can't see results until after the fact, which makes proactive management of unallowable cost nearly impossible.
The compliance stays with you. The burden doesn't.
Same calculation, same audit trail, same obligation — moved off your infrastructure and onto ours, where it's someone's full-time job to keep it correct.
moves
Policy and rate changes become configuration. Your developers build product instead of maintaining accounting logic.
The extension retires and the technical debt goes with it. One fewer system your team is on the hook to keep alive.
Documented logic maintained by a team, so the calculation outlives any one person's tenure — or memory.
Walk into a DCAA review already knowing every number holds — each result carries its inputs, reconstructable line by line.
What moves across the line.
| Responsibility | Your team today | SAP Concur tomorrow |
|---|---|---|
| Calculation logic | Custom extension you wrote | Built and owned by SAP Concur |
| Per diem rate updates | Manual, on your release calendar | Applied automatically |
| Monitoring and errors | Found downstream, usually at close | 24/7 monitoring and error logging |
| Platform changes | Your team rewrites to keep up | Life-cycle maintenance included |
| Developer support | Whoever is free that sprint | On-call access to the people who built it |
| Audit documentation | Reconstructed under pressure | Documented logic, standing |
Four mechanisms, running inside the workflow your travelers already use.
Delivered by the SAP Concur Custom Integration & Automation team as a hosted, managed service. You aren't buying a build. You're subscribing to an outcome.
It triggers itself
When a report is submitted, an event subscription fires the calculation. A system-level "ghost approver" holds the report just long enough to calculate — before it ever reaches a human.
Event Subscription ServiceIt finds the right rate
The correct location is resolved automatically, so the appropriate CONUS or OCONUS Department of State per diem rate is applied. No manual lookup, no stale rate table.
Itinerary Simulation APIIt counts the right attendees
Attendee counts are pulled directly from the entry, so business meals, social events, and foreign government official meals are each handled to their own policy treatment.
Expense v4 APIIt feeds your ERP cleanly
Results are written to the Standard Accounting Extract for downstream consumption. Calculated rates always reconcile to the total reimbursement amount.
Standard Accounting ExtractScoped to a specific travel policy, so the rest of your enterprise is untouched. Rates populate in USD for standardized ERP ingestion. Every result carries its inputs, so the calculation can be reconstructed line by line — years later, in front of an auditor.
Three small steps to the workshop. No commitment at any of them.
- Align internally on who should be in the room.Finance, travel policy, and whoever owns the ERP integration. That's usually the right group.
- Join a workshop with your SAP Concur team.Sixty minutes, working session format — not a pitch.
- Leave with the art of the possible.We walk through how this works in practice and what it would take to move the maintenance burden off your team.
You'll run this calculation either way. Do it as a service, and rate compliance stops being a system you maintain — and becomes one less thing standing between your team and the mission.