Concur Invoice

In the November 2019 release notes, the Connected List Data Type Now Available for Expense Attendee Form release note was accidentally published before the official release of this new functionality, which is currently targeted for a future release.

The Connected List data type functionality is part of the planned future direction of the product that is currently on our longer-range roadmap. More information will be published about this functionality when the entire feature is ready to be officially released.

This connected list functionality will not be universally supported for attendee records, and will only be available for very specific use cases for employee attendees (SYSEMP).

Clients who import historical invoices will have the payment method set to Client by default.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement protects clients from duplicate payments being performed.

Authentication

These changes are part of the SAP Concur continued commitment to maintaining secure authentication.

SAP Concur will soon begin the deprecation process of removing Hash-Based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) as an SSO option. The replacement service for HMAC is SAML SSO, a self-service method of setup where client admins have access within SAP Concur to complete their SAML connections.

Clients currently using HMAC are encouraged to migrate to the SSO self-service tool as soon as it is released (targeted for Q1 2020). The new SSO self-service tool allows multiple portals (Identity Providers) to be added.

The HMAC deprecation includes two phases:

PHASE I:

• Clients need to have an Identity Provider (IdP) or a custom SAML 2.0 solution.

• Clients begin testing the new SSO self-service tool.

• Clients prepare for onboarding new clients using the new SSO self-service tool, which is targeted for release in Q1 2020.

• Once the SSO tool is available, clients will be notified via release notes about the official deprecation date of HMAC. As of the official deprecation date, no new clients can be onboarded using HMAC; new clients must be onboarded using the new SSO self-service tool.

• Existing clients using HMAC must be migrated using the new SSO self-service tool.

PHASE II:

• Clients continue migrating existing HMAC clients to the new SSO self-service tool.

• Shut down the HMAC service after everyone has migrated from HMAC to the new SSO self-service tool. Phase II is targeted to end mid-year 2020.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides better security and improved support for users logging in to SAP Concur products and services.

Concur Open

On 19 December, several changes were made to Concur Open and Personalised Concur Open.

• Subscription Services: Email and RSS subscriptions for service status notifications are available only through Personalised Concur Open, which displays the service issues specific to a client's organisation. Current Concur Open subscriptions for SAP Concur clients have been migrated to Personalised Concur Open.

• Notification Email "From" Address: The notification email address has been updated from openupdates@concur.com to ConcurOpenUpdates@sap.com. Clients should ensure that they have added the @sap.com domain to their Safe Sender List and that users have updated any personal email inbox rules.

• Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Reports: After each incident, a preliminary RCA report is published, followed by a final RCA report that contains a more complete analysis with corrective actions. Both reports are published only in Personalised Concur Open.

• Service Availability Status: To better reflect client impact, the Performance Issue icon and Partial Performance Issue icon has been removed from Concur Open and Personalised Concur Open.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes provide better information for clients while also removing some of the information that was available to non-clients.

Security Enhancements

SAP Concur is announcing end-of-support for version 1.1 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption protocol. The more secure version 1.2 of TLS continues to be supported. As background, the TLS protocol allows secure back and forth communications between a phone or computer and a cloud-based service.

This change will occur on 30 January 2020.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: SAP Concur is taking this step after careful consideration of our clients’ security and the ease of upgrade to the newer, more secure version 1.2 of TLS. This end-of-support plan for TLS v 1.1 ensures that our clients are communicating with SAP Concur solutions in a safer and more secure manner using TLS v 1.2.

Currently, clients can use the Printed Invoice feature to configure and customise their own invoices that are emailed, displayed online or printed. Clients can also add graphics (for example, logos).

Targeted for 31 January 2020 – in order to meet security requirements – SAP Concur will no longer support graphics of any sort in invoices that are configured using the Printed Invoice feature.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides greater security for SAP Concur customers.

Concur Invoice

Concur Invoice users who can create invoices will soon be able to manage and customise columns from the Unsubmitted Invoices list view on the My Invoices page. To access the feature, invoice users click on the gear icon which opens the Manage Columns window.

They can then drag and drop fields between the Hidden and the Visible lists depending on what they want to see in the Unsubmitted Invoices list view.

Some of the fields cannot be removed (hidden). A warning message appears to notify the invoice user when they try to remove (hide) such a field.

In addition, an In-Product Message (IPM) with information about this feature will appear the first time an invoice user accesses the Unsubmitted Invoices list view.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement helps clients to customise the view they need to better manage their invoice information.

Invoice Pay

In a future release, checks generated by Invoice Pay will provide security enhancements based on the latest industry standards.

Clients will be able to order sample checks by creating a Salesforce ticket and then processing and verifying the checks with their bank.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement will provide more security when clients process checks.

Purchase Order

In a future release, users with the Purchase Order Processor role will have the ability to reopen closed purchase orders.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change enables the Purchase Order Processor to reopen a purchase order that has been incorrectly closed so that it can be processed correctly.

In a future release, users with the Purchase Order Processor role will be able to change the owner of a purchase order (PO). The new owner will see the POs that are assigned to them on the My Purchase Orders page.

In order to assign a PO to a new owner the following criteria must be met:

• The PO must be an SAP Concur-generated PO (imported POs cannot be reassigned using this feature).

• The new owner must have an active SAP Concur user account.

• The new owner must have the Purchase Request User role assigned to them.

• The new owner must have access to the policy and supplier associated with the relevant PO.

To support Change Order functionality, new PO owners will also be assigned as the owner of the purchase request the PO was created from. If more than one PO was created from a single purchase request, assigning a new PO owner to one PO will also assign them as the owner of the other POs associated to the same purchase request.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: If a PO owner is no longer an active SAP Concur user or is no longer responsible for new invoices associated with a PO, the Purchase Order Processor will be able to change the owner of the PO so that PO invoices can be routed to a new owner.