Request

All companies must take all reasonable steps to protect the personal and sensitive information of their employees. As per recommended security-related best practices, remember that custom fields should not contain personal and sensitive data.

If your company is currently using custom fields to store personal or sensitive data (for example, Social Security numbers, family member names or any other personally identifying information), you should plan to remove this information from your existing fields within the service and modify your current configuration.

Next Steps: For information about your configuration and the use of custom fields, contact Concur Support or your Account Manager.

Budget

This feature is available to Early Adopter clients only.

The Budget feature enables clients to set up all components of a budget; a fiscal year to determine the budget period, budget tracking fields to track spending on a cost centre (profit centre) level, budget categories to group expense types for budget purposes and budgets, which are the actual annual budgets, and Budget Items, which define the budget including fiscal year, budget owner, budget name and description.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature makes budgets visible, actionable and real-time for approvers and budget owners, leading to high-quality spending decisions for Request 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.

This new feature will allow clients to control how long Concur stores their data based on who, when and where criteria.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature gives clients the ability to meet their specific compliance needs regarding data retention.

For customers who currently display the Privacy Agreement page to users, be aware that on 14 April, 2018, Concur will eliminate that page. That means the privacy agreement will no longer display under any circumstances. In addition, the options to customise the privacy agreement text and to apply policy (for example, to require that a user accept the privacy agreement) will be removed.

In a separate release, Concur will provide a standard privacy statement, which can be accessed via a link in the page footer.

This release note discusses the removal of the Privacy Agreement page and its associated configuration options. Information about the new Concur privacy statement will be provided in future release notes.

The intent of the change is to ensure that all customers see the same unmodified Concur privacy statement.

Last year, when in-product messaging was introduced in Europe, the feature included the ability for users to opt out of messaging.

Targeted for the March release, Concur will provide customers in the United States the ability to opt out.

Concur is announcing the End of Support for plain text FTP as a means to transfer data to and from Concur.

Plain text FTP is not a secured protocol and has inherent security vulnerabilities. On 15 May, 2018, Concur Operations will apply 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 "Concur Trust Platform".

What This Means – The Client Experience: Transfer of data to and from Concur using plain text FTP after the End of Support date will result in a failure of incoming connections. Clients using plain text FTP must utilise one of the approved secured methods to continue transferring data as outlined in the File Transfer User Guide. This change is required on the client side, and Concur is available to support these efforts.

The Working for Others Quick Help contains important information and should be available to everyone. Currently, it is available only by clicking the “?” icon with a mouse. With the March release, the Working for Others Quick Help will become accessible via the keyboard.

User / Client Benefit: Working for Others Quick Help will be available to mouse users and keyboard users.

In June of 2017, accessibility tests for the June 2017 VPAT identified exceptions to the WCAG 2.0 global standards of the W3. These exceptions are identified issues where the location or action did not adhere to the A or AA standard of specific WCAG 2.0 rules. Resolving this issue improves our accessibility quality on the targeted location or action by aligning it to the appropriate WCAG standard.

Effectively, the issue and resolution is this: Screen readers are a type of assistive technology that audibly reads each screen element (instructional text, fields, options, etc.) to the user. Proper coding (in this case, known as alternative text or alt text) is required to ensure the reader “reads” the proper information to the user.

The issue is that the logo on the Sign In page does not currently have the proper code to read the logo description to the user. In the March release, this issue will be resolved.

User / Client Benefit: Enhancing our products and services to better align to the accessible standards of WCAG 2.0 increases the ability of all Concur users.

ConcurAccessible is a feature that provides certain accessibility features. However, with the many accessibility enhancements we have been making, ConcurAccessible has become obsolete and is no longer used. In addition, it can create inconsistent UI behaviour for users.

Given that, with the March release, all ConcurAccessible components will be removed from Concur.

User / Client Benefit: This ensures a consistent, better experience for all users.

Client Notifications

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

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