Concur bet its future on the expense report, the dull chore at the end of every business trip. In the 1990s that report was usually a paper form or a spreadsheet, checked by hand in a finance office. Concur sold software that moved the process online. Employees could file expenses, and managers could approve them quickly. When it went public in December 1998, Concur was a small company in the Seattle area. Sixteen years later, SAP paid about $8.3 billion for it.

A Chore Every Company Shares

Steve Singh, Rajeev Singh, and Mike Hilton founded the company in 1993. The bet was that expense reporting was a costly, error-prone task that every company shared. Large companies with many traveling employees were the natural first customers. Concur first sold software that customers installed themselves. Then it moved to delivering the software over the internet. That shift made it one of the early successes of software as a service.

Outtask, Then SAP

Concur priced its offering at $12.50 a share in December 1998. The stock fell hard after 2000, and the company nearly ran out of room. It survived by moving to a subscription service. Later it added travel booking through its purchase of Outtask. Concur grew into the standard tool for business travel and expenses. SAP acquired it in 2014 for about $8.3 billion, one of the largest software deals of that year.

Cover: The Traveler, Jacques Emile Blanche. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a traveler (business travel).