Think about your expenses for a moment. How many of those are automatically paid on a schedule? Many of your subscriptions and monthly bills are paid every month without having to give them any thought. Your Amazon Prime, cell phone, electric bill… even some of our groceries are automatically paid for and delivered to our doorsteps!
So why wouldn’t you do the same for your business?
Well, if you are a customer of SAP Concur using Comdata’s Mastercard payment solutions … Now you can!
ApexConnect, an absolutely top-notch data company, along with our partners at Cornerstone Information Systems has completed a groundbreaking labor of love making this possible, and we’re here to tell you about it.
ApexConnect Announces New Solution for Businesses to Connect Between Comdata and SAP Concur
Just this quarter, ApexConnect, Comdata, and SAP Concur finished up a monumental effort to connect SAP Concur with Comdata; building a payment portal to manage the payments, vendors, workflow, and integrations. In certifying the solution on Concur’s newest V4 Pay API, the offering simplifies complex business processes and offers customers an intuitive and comprehensive payment portal.
Comdata is a 50-year-old company and one of the largest commercial card issuers in the world who delivers innovative B2B payment technologies. The company partners with more than 30,000 businesses to better manage $55B in annual fleet, corporate purchasing, payroll and healthcare spending, making it the leading commercial Mastercard issuer in North America. Given those credentials, chances are you’re probably familiar with them.
In short, this solution accommodates SAP Concur customers to use Comdata for processing payments to vendors.
That’s not all. This was actually a first on SAP Concur’s new standard V4 payment API. Just as important — there were many accolades from SAP Concur and Comdata on the success, comprehension, creativity, as well as the completeness of the documentation and thoughtfulness for the customer use cases, existing customer migrations, and go-to-market approaches.
“Comdata’s focus on customers help them eliminate not just paper, it optimizes internal operation and processes while driving efficiencies into cash and treasury management,” says Greg Hulsey, the Senior Vice President of commercial card sales at Comdata. “By centralizing payments to vendors and leveraging today’s technology, companies can see not just increased efficiencies, but also incentives to optimize the entire AP flow.”
We are very excited to begin rolling this solution out and seeing how much time and money will to be saved for all businesses using this product. So is SAP Concur:
“Comdata provides Concur Invoice clients with an integrated, world-class virtual credit card program. In addition to paying invoices with check or ACH, clients can make payments using a secure, single-use MasterCard account number to minimize the cost and hassle of paper check payments. And because funds are delivered through the MasterCard network, you earn monthly rebates on spending, similar to the way a consumer earns cash back on a personal credit card.” – concur.com
We spoke with Comdata’s Senior Vice President of Operations for Corporate Payments, Meitra Aycock, for her take on this successful solution. She is enthusiastic to see AP Automation move forward. “This will save clients a lot of time and a lot of money.”
“Comdata is a leading provider of innovative payment and operating technology that drives actionable insights from spending data, builds enhanced controls and positively impacts its clients’ bottom lines.” – Meitra Aycock
According to research by Comdata, paper checks can cost your business upwards of $5 per check to pay your vendors. That means that the more business you do, the more money is wasted on those little pieces of paper. The setup for the AP automated program is quick and easy. Not only does the automation save time, but the data services linked to it chart out your expenses for you in a consolidated dashboard. No matter who you bank with, that’s something your manual paper check writing process cannot do!
Combining Convenience and Security
Typically, when we think of banking technology, security and convenience can often compete against each other. We all have experienced the choice between having your browser remember your credit card number and needing to fish the card out of your wallet every time you want to purchase something online. This becomes far more complicated when managing payments for hundreds of vendors that you manage for your business.
Comdata’s Virtual Card payment technology solves this conundrum.
Now, when you set up an invoice in the Comdata/SAP Concur solution for repeated and automatic billing, Comdata can generate a single-use 16-digit MasterCard number and deliver that number along with full invoice and remittance data to your vendor.
One card number for each transaction. That means even if the generated credit card number is compromised due to a breach on your vendor’s side, you don’t have to worry because your account is still secure.
Not to mention, since the virtual card is generated as a Mastercard, you are still able to apply the transaction to earning Mastercard rebates just as you might do with a regular personal or business credit card.
Convenience and security, in one elegant solution.
A Practical Solution for the Modern World
But how practical is this solution?
Very! As evidenced by the number of today’s Comdata customers using the previous iteration of this solution.
We asked ApexConnect’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Ross Atkinson, what this means for clients:
“Now that we’ve built this with Comdata, we can offer a market leading solution for Concur customers to process their payments through Comdata. That’s extremely important to customers. It streamlines and eliminates data handling errors.
Handling of processing payments to vendors itself also gives you a very clear cut, comprehensive master dataset of your vendors and your terms and conditions of payment. This helps to maximize your payment cycles to ultimately leverage your cash on hand and any incentives provided by Comdata.”
– Ross Atkinson, ApexConnect VP Marketing and Sales.
ApexConnect and Automation – Are You A Fit?
While we don’t know exactly what the future will hold, we can definitely take a moment and reflect that ApexConnect, Comdata, and SAP Concur’s team has moved us along the path of automation progress.
Now all that remains is to ask yourself: is your business ready for this future of B2B payments?
If you are interested in learning more about how this payment automation solution can help your company, email us at Apexsales@apexconnect.io