Retire Concur cleanly — kill the per-user subscription, archive the receipt-image library, re-cut corporate-card feeds, capture customization and reporting knowledge. IRS Pub 463 compliance preserved. Typical year-one savings: $400K–$2M.
Cancelling a SAP Concur subscription is the easy part. Preserving 10+ years of expense data, multi-TB receipt images, customization config and audit trail — that's where decommissioning projects succeed or fail.
SAP Concur — acquired by SAP in 2014 — accumulates a long tail of artifacts across 10+ years of operational life: tens of thousands of expense reports, millions of receipt images stored in S3-backed Concur infrastructure, dozens of Custom Field configurations driving cost-center coding, complex Audit Service rule sets enforcing per-diem and policy limits, intricate Workflow definitions for multi-level approval, Cognos report libraries built by finance over the years, and integration touchpoints into HR feeds, GL posting and corporate-card providers.
Concur decommissioning has to address every one of those artifacts before the SAP cancellation request goes in — otherwise the cancellation either gets blocked by internal compliance review (you can't decommission what you haven't preserved for IRS Pub 463) or executes and triggers an immediate fire-drill when the first auditor asks for a 5-year-old receipt. Syntra ETL's playbook addresses all six artifact categories in a sequenced, governed workflow that runs in parallel with the SAP contract notice period.
Whether you're decommissioning as the final phase of a Concur to Fusion Expenses migration or as a standalone exercise (replacing Concur with a different T&E platform), the same playbook handles the workflow — with the same rigor and the same audit trail.
Total typical year-one savings: $400K–$2M. The savings recur every subsequent year.
Concur per-active-user pricing means even a 'compliance-only' tenant bills for every historical user. Decommissioning eliminates $200K–$1.5M per year of subscription line item.
Concur tiered pricing adds upcharges for stored-data-volume above thresholds — receipt-image archives push customers into higher tiers. Decommissioning collapses to pennies-per-GB-month object storage.
Concur tenant admin (user provisioning, Custom Field maintenance, SAP support liaison) is typically $80K–$300K/year fully loaded. Decommissioning eliminates the role.
Live Concur integrations (HR feed, GL posting, corporate-card feeds) need ongoing maintenance even after live T&E moves. Decommissioning removes all three integration touchpoints.
A live Concur tenant is an attack surface, a SOC 2 compliance dependency and a vendor lock-in for a workflow no longer in use. Decommissioning removes all three risks.
Concur admin and Cognos report-developer skills are increasingly scarce post-SAP acquisition. Decommissioning eliminates the dependency on a shrinking talent pool.
A repeatable, governed workflow built for Concur's particular footprint. Typical end-to-end: 10–14 weeks.
Catalog every active user, every Custom Field, every Audit Service rule, every Workflow definition, every Cognos report, every integration touchpoint, every corporate-card program. Multi-TB receipt-image volume sized. Output: complete artifact register.
Concur REST extractors pull every expense report, receipt image, itinerary, corporate-card transaction and Invoice record. Staged as Parquet plus original images, partitioned by fiscal year, period and business unit. Hash-signed at record and image level.
Custom Field definitions, Audit Service rules with rule logic, Workflow definitions with approval-chain logic, Cognos report definitions exported and stored alongside the data archive. Business-purpose documentation captured per customization.
SQL (JDBC/ODBC) and REST endpoints provisioned. Role-based access configured. Pre-built audit/finance/tax/legal queries materialized. User-group training delivered (typically 90 min per group).
Coordinated with Amex/Visa/Mastercard and regional issuers: schedule feed cutoff, process last Concur file, configure target T&E platform with matching card programs, parallel reconciliation period for late-posting transactions.
Sign-off pack issued (archive validated against live tenant, customization catalog complete, card feeds cut over, integrations torn down). SAP Concur cancellation notice executed per master service agreement terms. Tenant moves to read-only then deactivated.
The outcomes that distinguish a successful concur decommissioning from a half-finished one.
Concur tenant cancelled per SAP master service agreement. Subscription line item removed from finance ledger. No 'just in case' tenant lurking on the books.
Every closed expense report, every receipt image, every itinerary, every card transaction available via SQL/REST. Sub-second auditor queries. IRS Pub 463 and SOX retention satisfied.
All corporate-card T-feeds re-cut at provider level to target platform. Parallel reconciliation completed. No transactions lost or double-counted.
HR feed, GL posting and corporate-card feed integrations cleanly torn down. No orphaned API clients, no stale credentials, no dangling cron jobs.
Every Custom Field, Audit Service rule and Workflow definition preserved with business-purpose documentation. Future audit questions answerable from the catalog.
Finance, audit, tax and legal teams trained on the archive query interface and pre-built saved queries. Cognos-equivalent reports mapped. No lingering 'how do I find X?' tickets.
Concur decommissioning is the process of formally retiring a SAP Concur tenant once live T&E has moved to Oracle Fusion Expenses or another platform — cancelling the per-active-user subscription, archiving the full data and customization configuration for retention compliance, retiring corporate-card feeds at the provider level, decommissioning integrations to GL/HR/AP systems, and ending the SAP Concur master service agreement. The work is more than a button-click: SAP Concur was acquired by SAP in 2014 and the tenant carries 10+ years of expense data, multi-TB receipt-image archives, dozens of Custom Field configurations and integration touchpoints into HR, GL and corporate-card providers. Syntra ETL ships a vetted concur decommissioning playbook covering each stage.
Concur subscription savings are the headline: per-active-user pricing means a mid-large enterprise typically pays $200K–$1.5M annually, and decommissioning eliminates that line item in full. Layered on top: Concur admin staff time ($80K–$300K/year fully loaded for a part-time or full-time admin handling user provisioning, Custom Field maintenance and SAP support liaison); integration maintenance ($30K–$150K/year for keeping HR feed, GL posting and corporate-card feeds running); and the soft cost of dual-platform operational complexity. Total typical year-one savings: $400K–$2M, with the saving running every subsequent year. Syntra ETL's decommissioning playbook usually pays back in under three months.
Six categories of artifact: (1) the complete expense data — every expense report, entry, allocation, approval, cash advance and mileage log; (2) the multi-TB receipt-image archive — original images plus OCR metadata, preserved for IRS Pub 463 7-year retention; (3) Custom Field, Audit Service rule, Workflow definition and Policy Configuration as a customization catalog ('what controls did Concur enforce?'); (4) Cognos report definitions and saved queries as report-library artifacts; (5) integration metadata — HR feed mappings, GL chart-of-accounts mappings, corporate-card BIN ranges and posting rules; (6) the SOC 2-relevant access log showing who saw what during the tenant's operational life. Syntra ETL's concur decommissioning playbook captures all six before the SAP cancellation request goes in.
End-to-end, typically 10–14 weeks from kickoff to tenant cancellation. The critical-path stages: full historical extract (3–5 weeks depending on receipt-image volume and Concur rate-limit window), customization and reports inventory (2–3 weeks), archive query interface stand-up and user training (2–3 weeks), corporate-card feed re-cutover at the provider level (2–4 weeks with provider coordination), integration teardown (1–2 weeks). The SAP cancellation contract notice itself runs 30–90 days depending on your master service agreement — so plan calendar dates accordingly. Customers who decommission as the final phase of a Concur to Fusion migration save the 3–5 week extract phase because the migration already captured the historical data.
Corporate-card feeds (Amex GBT, Visa Commercial, Mastercard SmartData and regional issuers) need re-cutover at the provider level — they don't simply redirect themselves to your new T&E platform. Syntra ETL's concur decommissioning playbook coordinates this: identify every active card-program and BIN range feeding Concur, work with each card provider to schedule cutover (typically 2–4 weeks lead time with Amex GBT global programs), ensure last Concur feed file is processed and reconciled before cutover, configure target platform (Fusion Expenses or other) with matching card programs, and run parallel reconciliation for 30 days post-cutover to catch late-posting transactions. Done right, no transaction is lost or double-counted.
Not if you archive properly. The Syntra ETL concur decommissioning playbook stands up a SQL/REST queryable archive — every expense report, every receipt image, every itinerary, every corporate-card transaction — that satisfies IRS Pub 463 7-year substantiation, SOX 7-year retention, EU/UK VAT recovery 6-year retention and FCPA effectively-indefinite retention. Auditors query the archive the same way they would have queried Concur Cognos, with sub-second response for typical lookups and full receipt-image drill-down. The archive includes SOC 2-compliant access logging so audit trail of who saw what during the retention window is preserved. Audit access is materially better post-decommission, not worse.
Yes. Most customers do exactly this. The common sequence is: Concur Invoice first (typically the lightest-touch module, AP-side), then Concur Expense (the heaviest module, requires receipt-image archive and corporate-card feed cutover), then Concur Travel last (often kept longest because corporate travel teams like the online booking tool). Each module can be archived and decommissioned independently while the others continue running. SAP Concur's contract structure typically allows per-module cancellation with appropriate notice — your account team can confirm specifics. Syntra ETL's playbook handles staged decommissioning by archiving each module separately while preserving cross-module joins (an expense report tied to an itinerary, a Concur Invoice payment tied to an expense).
Two categories: (1) the report-consumer knowledge transfer — finance, audit and tax users learn the SQL archive replaces Cognos for historical lookups (typically a 90-minute walkthrough per group with pre-built saved query equivalents), and (2) the customization knowledge capture — the team that built the Concur Custom Fields, Audit Service rules and Workflow definitions documents the business logic in plain English so the archive's customization catalog isn't just a code dump. Syntra ETL ships a knowledge-transfer template for both. The customization documentation also feeds future audit questions like 'why did this audit rule fire in 2023?' — the catalog plus the business-purpose documentation answers it.
30-minute discovery call. We'll walk through your Concur footprint, customization profile, receipt-image volume and integration touchpoints — and give you a concrete decommissioning timeline and year-one savings estimate.