Invoice

A new administrative role is now available for Invoice. The new role, Digital Compliance Administrator, is a shared role that enables a user to access the Expense and Invoice e-Bunsho timestamp validation tools.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The Digital Compliance Administrator enables an administrator to assign a single role to provide a user with access to the Expense and Invoice e-Bunsho timestamp validation tools.

For clients that have a payment request accounting extract configured, the following new field can be added to the purchase order extract definition:

• UOM Code

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change enables clients to extract the unit of measure (UOM) code entered on invoices in Concur Invoice. The UOM code can be useful or required in external systems to properly record and reconcile inventory quantities.

Purchase Request

A new Purchase Request API is available from the SAP Concur Developer Centre.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The Purchase Request API enables developers to create and automatically submit purchase requests for pre-authorisation leveraging external data, and to retrieve purchase request numbers and statuses by using the POST and GET methods.

Purchase Order

For clients that have a purchase order receipt extract configured, the following new field can be added to the purchase order receipt extract definition:

• UOM Code

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change enables clients to extract the unit of measure (UOM) code entered on purchase order receipts in Concur Invoice. The UOM code can be useful or required in external systems to properly record and reconcile inventory quantities.

SAP Concur Email

SAP Concur is transitioning to a new email infrastructure for outbound email from our products to SAP Concur users. Because of this, companies who filter inbound email based on the sending IP address must add the new IP addresses to their Safe Sender list to ensure that their users receive email from SAP Concur.

Concur Expense Only: Be aware that – at this time – the issue described here affects only companies that use Concur Expense and filter incoming email based on IP addresses. (This includes all editions of Expense – whether the company uses Expense by itself or integrated with any other SAP Concur product or service.) Other SAP Concur services (such as Travel and Concur Pay) are not currently affected.

We are currently targeting the first quarter of 2019 to make additional changes. Be aware that all affected companies will be notified well ahead of time and will be provided all possible options for managing this issue.

SAP Concur is in the process of updating the format of all email notifications. These changes will provide a fresher, consistent look and feel across all SAP Concur services.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The intent is to provide a consistent, updated look for users.

IMPORTANT

Note the following:

• Be aware that the email content has not changed – just the look and feel.

• The changes will appear over time. Each product team (Expense, Invoice, Travel, etc.) decides when to use the new format. Timing will be based on resource availability and the priority of other scheduled enhancements.

• Do not expect that all product emails will change at the same time. For example, perhaps Expense approval email will be first, and then other Expense notifications will follow.

• There is no assigned end date to the project. Expect that the changes may take longer than a year.

• Each team will provide release notes when their new emails are scheduled to appear.

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.

Invoice

After a successful Early Access programme of the new user interface, SAP Concur will soon offer an opt-in phase where all clients have the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the new user interface as SAP Concur prepares for general availability targeting the first quarter in 2019.

Through a new setting in Invoice Preferences, clients will be able to enable the new user interface and review the new Invoice Manager page functionality that is targeted at the Accounts Payable (AP) user who is constantly monitoring the health of the Invoice lifecycle within the system.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The new Concur Invoice user interface enables clients to work more efficiently and provides them greater visibility into their invoices in flight.

In a future release, SAP Concur will replace instances of the term "payment request" and its iterations with the term "invoice" and its iterations. These changes will be made in the user interface, the Invoice documentation and in all other SAP Concur product documentation where it appears.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change helps to ensure that the terminology used in SAP Concur is consistent with industry standard terminology.

Users with the Invoice Configuration Administrator role can now modify the default value for the Receipt Type field that appears on the Purchase Request Item form.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change facilitates three-way matching of receipts and other workflow requirements.

Purchase Order

The Import Now feature enables clients to import PO and PO receipt files into Invoice immediately without having to wait for an overnight scheduled import. This is beneficial for clients who need to import POs and PO receipts and work with them in the Concur Invoice product the same day they are created externally. This also allows clients to do multiple PO and PO receipt imports a day for more synchronised and up-to-date data.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature gives clients control over when and how frequently to import POs and PO receipts into Concur Invoice.

Supplier Management

In a future release, clients with the Create and Approve Suppliers feature enabled will be able to track changes to a supplier through the Audit Trail page within the supplier record in Supplier Manager. For example, when a supplier is approved or updated by the Supplier Manager, those actions will appear on the Audit Trail page.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change will enable users with the Invoice Supplier Manager role to track changes made to supplier information in Supplier Manager.

In a future release, the default form for adding and updating supplier information will include two additional fields, Country and Net Payment Terms.

The Country field contains the country associated with the supplier address.

The Net Payment Terms field reflects the number of days by which a payment must be made.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These fields enable clients to include additional information about requested and approved suppliers.

In a future release, the downloadable Supplier Import and Supplier Banking Import templates will include a new tab that provides details about the columns in the template.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The additional details help the client to ensure that the information in the supplier import template meets the requirements of the fields into which the information will be imported.

In a future release, some of the messages that are displayed in Supplier Manager when clients import suppliers using the supplier import template will be improved.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The improved messages will more clearly describe issues that were encountered during the import process so that the Supplier Manager can more easily identify and address these import issues.

In a future release, the Create and Approve Suppliers Feature will be available in test environments.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change enables developers and implementation teams to work with the Create and Approve Suppliers feature prior to moving to a production environment.

In a future release, on entities with the Create and Approve Suppliers feature enabled, the supplier information form will support the use of multi-level connected lists.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature will enable the Invoice Configuration Administrator to customise the supplier information form with multi-level list fields.

Budget

In a future release, workflows will be available for Budget. Workflows define how the system routes invoices, expense claims and requests through approval and processing steps. SAP Concur's flexible workflow feature for Budget allows companies to design workflows specifically tailored to their unique needs.

Without budget review, budgets may become fully consumed well before the end of a period or year leaving an organisation with limited options and budget owners with, for example, exceeded budgets. In addition, early spending means that more important (to the organisation) spending will be declined because lesser important spending consumed the budget early on.

Combining budget review in the workflow adds value. Audit rules and workflow step rules can help organisations to add in controls when it makes sense to fine tune to an organisation's specific needs.

Equally important is the determination when a spending item is regarded as committed toward a budget. In most organisations, the commit is when a spending item is paid; it went through most if not all approval steps. In other organisations, the commit occurs much earlier. As soon as a purchase request or an authorisation request is approved, it is regarded as "promised".

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature will provide clients with control over the budget spend to, for example, avoid exceeded budgets too early in a budget period or budget year.

Company Administration

Single Sign-On allows users to access multiple applications using one set of login credentials. Currently, SAP Concur has two methods for signing in: with a user name and password or using SSO with identity provider (IdP) credentials, such as a user's login credentials for their organisation.

SAP Concur is planning to add a Manage Single Sign-On (SSO) feature to SAP Concur which provides SAP Concur clients with a self-service option for setting up SSO for their organisation. SSO is currently supported for Concur Expense, Invoice, Request and Travel.

Other SAP Concur products and services are outside the scope of this initial release.

The new Manage Single Sign-On (SSO) feature will be accessible from the Administration > Company > Company Admin page.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature provides SAP Concur clients with a self-service option for setting up SSO.

Training Administration

To simplify the Training Administration page, the page will no longer have tabs, only the current contents of the Alternate URL tab will remain.

In addition to this change, access to the Training Administration page will move from Company Admin to Tools.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes make the page easier to find and use.

Test User Admin

SAP Concur is retiring the functionality in the Test User Admin feature that removes the transactions of test users from Concur Expense, Concur Invoice, Concur Travel and Concur Request.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change will allow SAP Concur to devote more resources to development and maintenance of features that are used by many or most of our clients.

SAP Concur

SAP Concur is planning to add a new Sign In page, providing an updated login experience for users who log in with user name and password credentials. Current Single Sign-On (SSO) users will log in without having to enter additional credentials. This feature is planned for 2019.

The new Sign In page feature includes the following:

• Two-step login: provides enhanced security, meets current industry standards and provides a better log in success rate

• Multi-account login: allows administrators to log in with multiple accounts

• Password hint removal: provides better security for users and SAP Concur

• User avatar: enhances the user experience (planned for a future release)

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature provides better security and a faster, more convenient experience for users logging in to SAP Concur products and services.

Miscellaneous

As SAP Concur continues to grow, steps must be taken to enhance and improve the performance of our system so that we can meet customer expectations and the needs of their business.

Our overall goal is to significantly improve the performance of SAP Concur services by reducing the amount of data that is stored in our Production datastore. By reducing the data in the Production system, we can use server memory much more efficiently, which reduces processing time for transactions. For this reason, SAP Concur is developing an archive process for users who have been deactivated by their employers for at least three years. The archive process moves this "deactivated" user data from our Production datastore to a separate Reporting datastore.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Moving deactivated user data will provide faster processing time for transactions. In addition, it provides a more secure environment for inactive users' personal information.

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 - Professional Edition