Audit Trail

With this release, the Expense audit trail log for an expense claim 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 claim, including a returned claim 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 claim
• Changed or deleted receipts

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

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

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

Company Card

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.

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

- EU datacentre: Completed on Tuesday, 4 April 2017

- US datacentre: Completed on Wednesday, 12 July 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

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

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

Company Cards

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

The Quick Tips section of the Concur Solutions home page (concursolutions.com) is planned 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

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 claim.
• Expense Assistant will not add expenses to a returned expense claim. The exception is when a returned claim includes a transaction that now matches an expense in Available Expenses.

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

• When the user opens an expense claim, any transactions added by Expense Assistant since the user last viewed the claim 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 claim 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

Concur is now aiming to release the enhanced fiscal calendar for Analysis/Intelligence in August. A fiscal calendar allows organisations to define their accounting periods independent of the standard calendar year. Many organisations 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 Authorisation Request

Concur plans to retire our legacy Expense Authorisation Request feature on 31 March 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

Support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 10 browsers under Concur products will end on 18 August 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

The USB IC Card reader solution for capturing Japanese IC Card travel information in Expense utilises 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 1 August 2017, Concur will no longer support this solution.
• After 31 December 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

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