Admin

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).

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 whereby 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, customers 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 need to 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.

Budget Insight

Budget Insight was a budget management tool that retired 31 December 2019. Clients who want to use budget functionality are recommended to implement the new Budget product.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The retirement of Budget Insight provides clients with the opportunity to implement the new Budget product, which gives greater value to clients by making budgets visible, actionable and near real-time.

Cards

For clients who use Visa card feeds with Visa Commercial Format (VCF) 4.0 and 4.4 formats, SAP Concur is enhancing the matching functionality for hotel and car rental transactions. With this change, all existing and new configurations for Employee ID from Passenger Specific Data will automatically be extended to also check hotel and car rental data, depending on the type of transaction.

To reflect this change in functionality, the field on the Configure Field Labels for Lodge Account page will be renamed. The Employee ID from Passenger Specific Data field will be renamed Employee ID from Passenger Specific or Car Rental or Hotel Specific Data.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change facilitates fewer orphaned lodge transactions that require manual employee assignment by a company card administrator.

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 customer's organisation. Current Concur Open subscriptions for SAP Concur customers 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. Customers 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 customer 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 customers while also removing some of the information that was available to non-customers.

Expense Pay – Classic

SAP Concur contacted each client for whom this release note is applicable.

For clients who had bank accounts in Mexico that SAP Concur opened per a client request for the sole reason of processing reimbursement of Expense Pay MXN transactions, where no transactions occurred on the account in the past 12 months, such inactive accounts closed on 31 December 2019.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change allowed SAP Concur to remain compliant with local rules and regulations as well as internal guidelines with our bank.

Miscellaneous

Users often combine two expense-related items, such as a card transaction with a manually created expense entry. During the merge process, most fields are either copied or ignored based on precedence rules, to ensure that the most important information persists.

Currently – for custom fields – this process may cause unexpected results if the two items (in this case, card transaction and expense) use different expense entry forms. The result might be that the custom field data on the manually created expense entry is deleted, when the desired result would be for it to persist.

With the January release, this process will change. Data in custom fields will persist:

• Regardless of whether the combining items use the same expense entry forms

• If the data types (list and text only) are the same

• If the data type is list, the two forms must use the same list.

Initially, this change applies only to custom fields that are of the List or Text data type. Over time, other data types will be included.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change saves time for users who may have to re-enter data in custom fields.

Next Generation (NextGen) Expense

Update: In order to respond to and take advantage of feedback from customers, and to align with SAP Concur’s commitment to ensure a smooth and successful transition, we are working on a revised deployment strategy for Next Generation Expense.

SAP Concur is dedicated to the consistent improvement of our products, not only the features they provide, but also the experience of using those features. How users interact with technology changes over time, along with needs and expectations. We are constantly listening to our customers and soliciting feedback on how we can improve the user experience.

NextGen Expense is the continued evolution of the SAP Concur user experience. It was built from extensive user research and data analytics that include 680 1:1 conversations, 58 usability studies, 3,000+ survey responses and 1.3B monthly user actions.

Customers will have the ability to preview and then opt in to NextGen Expense before the mandatory cutover.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The result is the next generation of the Expense user interface designed to provide a modern, consistent and streamlined user experience. This technology not only provides an enhanced UI, but also allows SAP Concur to react more quickly to customer requests to meet changing needs as they happen.

Quick Expense

Effective 31 March 2020, the Quick Expense v1 and Quick Expense v3 APIs will be retired and decommissioned. We encourage all current users to migrate to Quick Expense v4 as soon as possible.

Please refer to the deprecation policy for definitions and additional information.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update removes two outdated APIs.

Security Enhancements

Currently, customers can use the Printed Report (or Printed Invoice) feature to configure and customise their own expense claims, invoices and requests that are emailed, displayed online or printed. Customers can also add graphics (generally logos).

Targeted for 31 January 2020 – in order to meet security requirements – SAP Concur will no longer support graphics of any sort in expense reports, invoices and requests that are configured using the Printed Report (or Printed Invoice) feature.

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

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

This change will happen on 30 January 2020.

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