Admin

Concur Open is the SAP Concur service status dashboard, which displays known and widespread outages and incidents for select SAP Concur services and all data centers. Concur Open displays the current service status as well as incident history for the past 20 days.

Personalized Concur Open became available on September 11.

With the release, there will be new functionality added to Concur Open. SAP Concur users will be able to log in to a personalized view of Concur Open and:

• View service status for the services and the data center that are specific to their company

• Access subscription options for updates about the incidents that impact the services specific to their company

• View service history for the past two years as well as detailed root cause analysis information and the actions taken by SAP Concur for specific incidents

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Customers use Concur Open to monitor their SAP Concur services outages, status, and availability. Adding the new functionality will provide customers a personalized view of their service status and availability. SAP Concur's goal is to provide a more accurate and transparent view of incidents/outages.

Next Generation (NextGen) Expense

Update: In order to respond to and take advantage of feedback from customers, and to align with SAP Concur’s commitment to ensure a smooth and successful transition, we are working on a revised deployment strategy for Next Generation Expense.

SAP Concur is dedicated to the consistent improvement of our products, not only the features they provide, but also the experience of using those features. How users interact with technology changes over time, along with needs and expectations. We are constantly listening to our customers and soliciting feedback on how we can improve the user experience.

NextGen Expense is the continued evolution of the SAP Concur user experience. It was built from extensive user research and data analytics that include 680 1:1 conversations, 58 usability studies, 3,000+ survey responses, and 1.3B monthly user actions.

Customers will have the ability to preview and then opt in to NextGen Expense before the mandatory cutover.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The result is the next generation of the Expense user interface designed to provide a modern, consistent, and streamlined user experience. This technology not only provides an enhanced UI, but also allows SAP Concur to react more quickly to customer requests to meet changing needs as they happen.

Plain Text File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

SAP Concur announced the End of Support for plain text FTP to transfer data to and from SAP Concur in November 2017. SAP Concur provided clients an extension until September 1st, 2018 to complete their transition to secure FTP protocols.

Plain text FTP is not a secured protocol and has inherent security vulnerabilities. On September 1st, 2018, SAP Concur Operations applied a security update to our File Transfer infrastructure, restricting the use of plain text FTP as a part of our ongoing commitment to securing our customers’ data and meeting the audited security requirements of the SAP Concur Trust Platform.

For more information, refer to the Plain Text FTP Retirement FAQ (Enslish Only).

QuickBooks Financial Integration

SAP Concur has updated the page displaying the QuickBooks objects synchronized with SAP Concur for clients that use financial integration. This page (accessed from the Accounting page of Product Settings) now contains tabs for each type of object synchronized with SAP Concur:

• Accounts

• Employees/Vendors

• Customers/Classes

• Items

The admin can select the desired tab to view the objects, and can now view the Code in addition to the Name for each cost object.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update provides a detailed view of the objects synchronized between QuickBooks and SAP Concur, with improved performance.

Uploading Receipt Images

Users no longer have the option to upload scanned images of receipts that are formatted as HTML files.

Users will continue to be able to upload receipt images that use the following file formats: PNG, JPG, JPEG, PDF, TIF, and TIFF.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change closes a security gap and allows SAP Concur to devote more resources to features that are used by many or most of our clients.

Planned Changes

The items in this section are targeted for future releases. Concur reserves the right to postpone implementation of – or completely remove – any enhancement/change mentioned here.

Admin

Admins can now pre-configure Expense Assistant options.

Expense Assistant can automatically create trip-based expense reports and add trip-based expenses to these expense reports. Currently, Expense Assistant automatically creates monthly expense reports as a client's expenses flow into Concur. This is known as creating a calendar-based expense report.

With this enhancement, Expense Assistant can create either of two types of expense reports: calendar-based and trip-based. When Expense Assistant creates a trip-based expense report, Expense Assistant will automatically create an expense report based on a specific trip booked in Concur Travel, and will populate the expense report with the client's expenses that occur between the trip's start and end dates.

Users using Expense Assistant will only be able to have Expense Assistant automatically create calendar-based or trip-based expense reports, not both types of expense reports.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature automates more of the expense reporting process, to provide an easier end user experience.

Product Settings

The Cost Tracking page in Product Settings will soon have a new look and flow, and a new name. All existing functionality will remain with improved usability for field setup and management.

The new enhancements include the following:

• The Cost Tracking page will be renamed to Manage Custom Fields. The new Manage Custom Fields page will allow client admins to manage custom fields starting from one page. Linked List will be renamed to Multilevel list.

• A new Add New Field page will also be accessible from the Manage Custom Fields page. The Add New Field page will allow client admins to create fields by selecting the field's type and then selecting field options. Client admins can then opt to add list items for the new field, add another field, or return to the Manage Custom Fields page.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature improves custom field management by providing a better end user experience.

Client Notifications

The list of non-affiliated subprocessors is available here: SAP Concur list of Subprocessors (English Only)

Monthly browser certifications, both current and planned, are available with the other SAP Concur monthly release notes, accessible from What's New - Standard Edition