Concur Invoice

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

Supplier Management

The downloadable Supplier Import and Supplier Banking Import templates now include a new tab that provides details about the columns in the template.

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

Some of the messages that are displayed in Supplier Manager when clients import suppliers using the supplier import template have been improved.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The improved messages 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.

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 that 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 Concur Expense – whether the company uses Concur Expense by itself or integrated with any other SAP Concur product or service.) Other SAP Concur services (such as Concur Travel and Concur Pay) are not currently affected.

We are currently targeting the first quarter of 2019 to make additional changes. Please monitor the release notes for more information about the timing of the additional changes.

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.

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.

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 first 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

SAP Concur is planning to update an authentication setting for clients who transfer files to/from SAP Concur. The updated setting will lock a user account after five failed authentication attempts. Some accounts are already using this setting, and this change will update all accounts to use this setting. This authentication change does not impact the main SAP Concur application login, only the file transfer process.

Clients who are locked out of their account can contact SAP Concur support to unlock their account.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature provides better security for clients that access extract and import files.

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.

IMPORTANT!

We are currently piloting the process and evaluating the results. Our goal is to ensure that customers are not negatively affected, that we have considered all pertinent scenarios and that the archiving process provides the desired results.

There is no target date for the implementation of this new process. We will announce via release notes well ahead of time.

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