July 2017 Expense Professional Edition Admin Summary

Last Update: August 17 2017

Audit Trail

Improved Auditing of Submitted and Returned Expense Reports

With this release, the Expense audit trail log for an expense report will now include a complete history of changes made by any user. These changes are logged from the initial submission and on throughout the life of the report, including a returned report action. The changes include (but are not limited to) the following actions:

  • Expenses added, moved, or deleted by any means, including manually, by Available Expense association, and expenses moved to report
  • Changed or deleted receipts

Expense reports returned after submission include changes made on return, including:

  • Modified expense line item values, such as expense type, location, amount, vendor, transaction date, and custom field values
  • Modified report header values, including policy, custom fields (Cost Center; etc.)
  • Cash expenses removed from the returned report
  • Receipt images added to or removed from the report or the associated expenses

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement improves the logging capability of the Audit Trail feature.

Company Card

Auto-Assignment via Employee ID Supported in MasterCard Import

With this release, the MasterCard credit card importer is enhanced to capture the Employee ID data available through the Credit Mutuel Corporate Card credit card feed. This update supports automatic assignment and means clients affected by the lack of assignment may now no longer manually match their transactions. Now, the feed will do this as is done in other importers.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement supports auto-assignment of accounts via the MasterCard Credit Mutuel Corporate Card credit card feed.

Central Reconciliation: Improvements to CDF3 Matching Logic

With this release, CDF3 custom financial data is now used to accurately assign a Central Reconciliation (CR) transaction to an employee or a request. This change is in response to MasterCard's deprecation of custom reference values (CustomRefValues) that previously provided the Employee ID and/or the Request ID data used by CR to match transactions.

Now, with this change by MasterCard, this data is only available through the custom financial data (CustomFinancialData) values, which CR will now reference in the feed to detect values for Employee ID and Request ID.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement adapts the Central Reconciliation feature to a change made by MasterCard in order to continue accurate transaction matching using the feed data.

Expense Pay – Global

Assistance Ensuring Onboarding Information is Complete

Clients are no longer able to accept Bambora terms and conditions (for setting up payment-processing partner funding accounts with Bambora) until they have filled in all of the required fields and uploaded all the required documents.

Users filling out Bambora onboarding forms which lack the required information, are no longer allowed to proceed to accepting the terms and conditions. If information is incomplete on one of the Directors tabs, the corresponding tab displays a red indicator.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Clients will no longer be under the impression that the application form is complete if it is not. The ability to accept the terms and conditions and submit the form ensures that the form is complete when presented to the payment-processing partner.

Audit Codes Replaced with Meaningful Text

To improve the usefulness of information about why employee payment was denied, Concur has replaced Bambora return codes with reason text.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Users and Admins will have textual information, rather than a return code, to help them understand why the banking system denied a payment.

Currency-Specific Address Fields for Bambora Forms

Concur has changed the names of three address fields. The names are now accurate for the location corresponding to the currency selected.

Concur renamed the following fields for the United States Dollar (USD):

Previous Field Name

New Field Name

Region

State

Postcode

ZIP Code

Concur renamed the following field for the Canadian Dollar (CAD):

Previous Field Name

New Field Name

Region

Province

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This localization provides a better client experience.

New USD and CAD Card Program: Diners MasterCard

Expense Pay – Global now supports Diners MasterCard credit cards for the following currencies:

  • United States Dollar (USD)
  • Canadian Dollar (CAD)

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change adds value for our Expense Pay – Global clients.

Expense Report Approval Email Message

Link for Accessing Expense Reports Updated

When an employee submits an expense report for approval, Concur automatically generates and sends the expense report approver the You have a report pending your approval email message. In the auto-generated message, the links to the expense report pending approval were consolidated into one button, View Report.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update simplifies the email message, making it easier to understand.

Profile

UPDATE: Accessibility Setting in Profile

Recently, we stated that the accessibility feature will no longer be optional and that the feature will be defaulted to ON for all Concur sites.

Upon further research, we have concluded that this change would provide mixed results. Our intent going forward is that – for Expense clients – there will be no change from what they see today and how they use Expense.

TLS v 1.0 Encryption Protocol

Support for TLS v 1.0 Encryption Protocol to End – COMPLETE

- EU datacenter: Completed on Tuesday, April 4 2017

- US datacenter: Completed on Wednesday, July 12 2017

Several months ago, Concur announced an End of Support cycle for version 1.0 of the TLS encryption protocol, continuing support for the more secure 1.1 and 1.2 versions of TLS. As background, the TLS protocol allows secure back and forth communications between a phone or computer and a cloud-based service.

This process has spanned several months and is now complete.

Travel Allowance

Change in the Calculation of Meal Allowance for a Mixed Trip – Czech Republic

Concur has changed the Czech Republic calculation of meal allowances for two kinds of mixed trips:

  • Mixed trips consisting of more than five hours of domestic travel and between five hours and twelve hours of foreign travel
  • Mixed trips consisting of foreign travel that is more than 12 hours, but less than 18 hours

The new, legally compliant, calculations are shown in the following table.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Kind of Mixed Trip

Previous Calculation

New Calculation

Domestic travel > 5 hours plus

Foreign travel > 5 hours and < 12 hours

Domestic meal allowance plus 1/3rd of full foreign meal allowance

1/3rd of full foreign meal allowance

Foreign travel > 12 hours and < 18 hours

Domestic meal allowance plus 2/3rd of full foreign meal allowance

2/3rd of full foreign meal allowance

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The change allows Concur clients who do business in the Czech Republic to maintain best-practice legal compliance.

Company Cards

**Planned Changes** New Fields to Capture Overseas Transactional Data

With this release, new fields are available for the Japan market that can capture additional data included in overseas transactions. This is useful for clients who want to use these fields in their workflow and accounting extract configurations to capture this transaction data for their financial systems.

These fields include:

  • Merchant City
  • Merchant State
  • Merchant Country Code

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement allows Expense to capture additional data found in overseas transactions.

Concur Solutions Home Page

**Planned Changes** Quick Tips Section to be Removed from Concur Solutions Page

The Quick Tips section of the Concur Solutions home page (concursolutions.com) is targeted to be removed in the August service release.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update simplifies the home page, making it easier to view and access the information on the page.

Expense Assistant

**Planned Changes** Expense Assistant

Expense Assistant will soon be available for Expense users in September. In August, it will be possible to turn off this feature.

Expense Assistant has the following features:

  • The feature is enabled by default for the company, but can be turned off, if needed, at the company level to block access for all users. If the company allows access to Expense Assistant, each individual user will be allowed to opt in to use this feature.
  • If there are any expenses in Available Expenses, Expense Assistant will add them to an expense report.
  • Expense Assistant will not add expenses to a returned expense report. The exception is when a returned report includes a transaction that now matches an expense in Available Expenses.

For example, if the returned report contains an ExpenseIt expense, and a credit card transaction that matches that expense is in Available Expenses, when the report is returned, Expense Assistant will combine the ExpenseIt transaction with the credit card transaction.

  • When the user opens an expense report, any transactions added by Expense Assistant since the user last viewed the report will be formatted in bold. The bolding will be removed when the user opens and views that expense.
  • Expense Assistant sends a summary email of all the activity that happened in the expense report to the user once a week.

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

Fiscal Calendar

**Planned Changes** Enhanced Fiscal Calendar for Analysis / Intelligence

Concur is now targeting to release the enhanced fiscal calendar for Analysis/Intelligence in August. A fiscal calendar allows organizations to define their accounting periods independent of the standard calendar year. Many organizations define their own calendars to model their financial reporting to reflect seasons in their business, to compare results with direct competitors, and to avoid the busy year-end season in January.

The new fiscal calendar will be available under Reporting Configuration, which is accessed via Administration > Expense or Administration > Invoice.

For more information, refer to the release notes for Analysis / Intelligence.

Legacy Expense Authorization Request

**Planned Changes** Product Retirement

Concur plans to retire our legacy Expense Authorization Request feature on March 31, 2018.

Concur offered this feature to some clients prior to the existence of the standalone Concur Request product. We now have feature parity as well as enhanced features and full support on the standalone Request product. Clients that wish to leverage a request capability within Concur should purchase and migrate to the Concur Request product.

A client-facing FAQ is available: http://assets.concur.com/concurtraining/cte/en-us/legacy_request_retirement_faq.pdf

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This retirement allows Concur to focus development resources on further enhancements to our standalone Concur Request product whose functionality, innovation, and value now exceeds that of our legacy feature.

Microsoft IE v.10

**Planned Changes** Support is Ending

Support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 10 browsers under Concur products will end August 18 2017. Concur strongly advises clients using IE v.10 to update to the latest IE browser version before that date, or to install and work with another supported browser.

Users still using IE v.10 will see a banner.

USB IC Card Readers – Japan

**Planned Changes** Support is Ending

The USB IC Card reader solution for capturing Japanese IC Card travel information in Expense utilizes a reader connected to a single computer. Because Microsoft is deprecating the ActiveX technology leveraged by this solution, Concur is ending support for the solution.

Important dates:

  • On August 1, 2017, Concur will no longer support this solution.
  • After December 31, 2017, the solution is being retired and will no longer work in Concur.

As a replacement, Concur's current solution uses a Network IC Card Reader, which our Japanese clients are already deploying. The Network IC Card Reader has the benefit of allowing multiple users to import transactions at a central location.

For the Network IC Card Reader release note, refer to the October 2016 version of this document.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This retirement keeps Concur users aligned with current technology.

Client Notifications

Concur Non-Affiliated Subprocessors

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

Monthly Browser Certifications

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