Concur Invoice

Clients still have the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the new user interface as SAP Concur prepares for general availability targeting the second quarter in 2019.

UPDATES FOR MARCH

For clients reviewing this feature, SAP Concur has now added the following features:

• On the new summary pages, Request Name has been renamed Invoice Name.

• On submit or assign, a window appears asking users if they want to go to the next invoice or return to the list of invoices.

• On the My Invoices page, Purchase Order Invoices have been renamed All Sent to Purchasing and a new option, Sent to Purchasing, appears in the View menu.

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.

With the e-Bunsho Timestamp feature for Japan, Invoice now supports digital timestamps of invoice images from companies and invoice service suppliers.

When this feature is enabled, rules are put in place to ensure that users provide the necessary invoice information to maintain legal compliance with Japan’s e-Bunsho regulation. A user must first confirm the invoice image is the valid image for the invoice being entered before they can time-stamp the image and the invoice cannot be submitted for approval until the Invoice image has been successfully time-stamped.

There is a validation process for monitoring received, pending, requested and ineligible timestamps. The validation process re-validates the successfully time-stamped invoice images and displays counts and totals by date range for valid and invalid time-stamped images.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature enables clients in Japan to maintain legal compliance with e-Bunsho regulations if they use digital invoices in lieu of paper invoices.

Purchase Request

A Concur Invoice administrator with the appropriate permissions can now configure the default value for the Receipt Type field that appears on the Purchase Request Item form. Prior to this change, the Receipt Type field defaulted to Quantity Receipt for goods items and None for service items.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature enables an administrator to set the default value for the Receipt Type for goods items and service items to either Quantity Receipts or None to ensure that the receipt type defaults to the desired value.

Purchase Order

For clients who import purchase orders on entities that do not have the Purchase Request feature enabled, a user who is assigned the Purchasing Order Processor or Purchase Order Processor (Audit) role can now see a list of imported purchase orders.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature enables clients that handle purchase order invoices to manage and view imported purchase orders more easily.

For clients who import purchase orders on entities that do not have the Purchase Request feature enabled, a user who is assigned the Invoice Configuration Administrator or Invoice Configuration Administrator (Restricted) role now has access to the Administration > Invoice > Shipping Configuration page.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The Shipping Configuration page enables clients to create shipping methods (for example, FedEx 2Day and UPS Ground) and shipping terms (for example, FOB),which can be included on purchase orders imported from an external system.

Supplier Management

Clients with the Create and Approve Suppliers feature enabled can now 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 appear on the Audit Trail page.

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

The Create and Approve Suppliers feature is now 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.

Company Administration

In an effort to ensure the ongoing security of our products and services, SAP Concur has issued a new concursolutions.com SSL certificate. The current certificate will expire on 16 March 2019.

Any client who has pinned this expiring certificate will need to update to the new certificate prior to 16 March 2019. If the pinned certificate is not updated prior to 16 March 2019, your organisation and users will experience disruption to SAP Concur products and services.

Clients who have not pinned the certificate do not need to take any action as the new certificate is updated automatically. Most clients do not pin the certificate.

Please be aware: As an enhancement to our Security and Compliance programme, this certificate will be updated on an annual basis.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update provides ongoing security for our products and services.

Concur Open

Concur Open and Personalised Concur Open users can subscribe to email notifications about the SAP Concur products they use. As part of the subscription process, SAP Concur sends a verification email to the user. The user must click Verify in the email in order to receive the notifications.

Because some users are not completing the verification step, SAP Concur has added a reminder to the subscription page.

For more information about Personalised Concur Open, refer to the Personalised Concur Open fact sheet.

SAP Concur Email

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

Initially, the issue described here affected only companies that use Concur Expense. Starting in January, email from other SAP Concur services (such as Concur Travel and Concur Pay) will move to the new email infrastructure.

We will continue to add other services throughout the first quarter of 2019. Please monitor the release notes for more information about the timing of the additional changes.

SAP Concur has provided a release note about the updated email notifications for several months. Be aware that we will discontinue this release note after this month.

IMPORTANT

Note the following:

• The email content has not changed – just the look and feel has been updated.

• 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, the Expense approval email might be first, and then other Expense notifications might follow.

• There is no assigned end date for the project. The changes might take longer than a year.

IMPORTANT FOR SSO CLIENTS

The link in the email still works as it always has – redirecting the user for proper SSO authentication. The user can see the underlying URL at any time by hovering the mouse pointer over the www.concursolutions.com link.

This change does not affect those emails where the user clicks a button – instead of a link – to access Concur Expense.

Miscellaneous

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

NEXT STEPS

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.

For additional information, refer to the FAQ (English Only).

Concur Invoice

SAP Concur will soon offer a new user experience that is particularly targeted at the Accounts Payable (AP) user who is constantly monitoring the health of the Invoice lifecycle within the system. With a new AP landing page, concepts of "call to action" and "work to zero" are being brought to the forefront to better inform AP users to ensure they are working on the highest priority task.

The new user interface in Concur Invoice that clients can now review and familiarise themselves with is targeted for general availability the second quarter in 2019.

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 Concur 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.

Purchase Order

The Import Now feature enables clients to import PO and PO receipt files into Concur 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.

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. The flexible workflow feature for Budget that SAP Concur offers 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 spending that is more important to the organisation will be declined because less 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.

Security

In a future release, the ability to reset or update user passwords through the User Import and Employee Import features will be removed. The ability to set the password for new users during the initial import through the User Import and Employee import features will still be available.

USER IMPORT

The password field will remain available in the downloadable Excel template, but will only be read during an initial import of the file or when creating a new user in the system. Subsequent uses of the field will be ignored by the system.

For general information about this functionality, refer to the Shared: User Import User Guide.

EMPLOYEE IMPORT

The password fields will remain available in the 100, 300, 305 and 310 record sets, but will only be read during an initial import of the file or when creating a new user in the system. Subsequent uses of the field will be ignored by the system. The update and replace password features on the 100 record will no longer be used.

For general information about this functionality, refer to the Shared: Employee Import Specification.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides greater security for user passwords.

Company Administration

In a future release, SAP Concur will no longer support composite login sign-in page URLs.

Composite login functionality allows users to use a login ID that does not include a domain to log in to SAP Concur products. The typical URL for a composite login page includes the name of the entity (for example, entity=pxxxxxxxxx) and is formatted as follows: https://www.concursolutions.com/signin.asp?entity=pxxxxxxxxx.

After this change is implemented, all users who use only their username to log in will need to use their CTE Login Name rather than their login ID to log in to SAP Concur products.

In addition, all clients will use the standard Sign In page to access SAP Concur products. The standard sign in page is located at the following address: https://www.concursolutions.com/nui/signin

Deprecation of the composite login pages for www.concursolutions.com is targeted for 11 May 2019.

EFFECTS ON USERS

Users who log in to a composite login page (https://www.concursolutions.com/signin.asp?entity=pxxxxxxxxx) and do not use an ampersand (&) symbol in their user name must contact their company administrator to get their CTE Login Name. User passwords will remain the same.

Single Sign-On functionality is not impacted by this change. The following users will not be impacted because they do not log in using https://www.concursolutions.com:

• SAP Concur web SSO

• SAP Concur Mobile username/password

• SAP Concur Mobile SSO

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Deprecating this feature improves login stability and login success rates, while reducing login dependency.

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, Concur Invoice, Concur Request and Concur 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.

SAP Concur is planning to add a new Sign In page, providing an updated login experience for users who log in with a user name and password credentials. Current Single Sign-On (SSO) users will be able to start the SSO login process at www.concursolutions.com. 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 login success rate

• Multi-account login: allows administrators to log in with multiple accounts (planned for a future release)

• 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.

SAP Concur will add a new Forgot Password feature to the SAP Concur Sign In page, providing an updated login experience for users who log in with user name and password credentials.

When the new Forgot Password feature is released (targeted for 11 May), the following existing Forgot Password page functionality will be deprecated:

• Security Questions: Users will no longer receive security question prompts for login authentication.

• On-page text: Company custom text will no longer be displayed.

• Password hints: The Send me an email with my password hint option will no longer be available.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature provides greater security for user passwords and streamlines the user experience.

Training Administration

To simplify the Training Administration page, the functionality and content will be changing.

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

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes will make the Training Administration feature 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.

Miscellaneous

This information will no longer appear in the release notes.

For more information about deactivated users, refer to the General Information: Archiving Deactivated User Data Fact Sheet.