Concur Invoice Professional Edition Administration Help

November 2021 Concur Expense Professional Edition Admin Summary

Update #1

Release Note Summaries

The items in this section are summaries of the release notes for this month. The Professional Edition release notes are accessible from What's New - Professional Edition.

Authentication

CES SSO Decommissioned

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

The Concur Expense Service (CES) SSO was decommissioned on 29 October, 2021.

SAP Concur now provides a Single Sign-On self-service option that enables client admins to set up their SAML v2 connections without involving an SAP Concur admin.

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

Authentication Administration

New Company Request Token Self-Service Tool

In late August, a new Company Request Token self-service tool will be available to SAP Concur admins who have been assigned the Company Admin or Web Services Admin role.

The Company Request Token self-service tool enables clients to generate the Company Request Token that is required to request a JSON web token (JWT) when connecting to APIs on the SAP Concur platform.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: The Company Request Token self-service tool enables clients to generate Company Request Tokens without contacting SAP Concur support. This tool also enables clients to generate a replacement Company Request Token without assistance from SAP Concur support if their Company Request Token expires or is lost.

Client Web Services

Self-Service Tool for Application Management

Beginning with the October release, clients who have SAP Concur Client Web Services can request access to a new application management self-service tool, OAuth 2.0 Application Management. This self-service tool is enabled by the Client Web Services team for SAP Concur Web Services clients who request it.

When enabled, the tool is available from the Authentication Administration page to admin users who have been assigned the Web Services Admin role.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: The OAuth 2.0 Application Management tool enables clients to generate Client IDs (App IDs) and Client Secrets without contacting SAP Concur support.

Expense Pay – Global

(USD) Additional Card Programmes Supported for Worldline

Expense Pay – Global now supports the following credit card programmes for the United States Dollar (USD $):

  • American Express - EMEA – Gulf Dollar

  • American Express - EMEA - Dollar 45

  • Bank of the West - Visa/MasterCard - USD

  • HSBC - MasterCard - USD

  • SunTrust - Mastercard - USD

  • SunTrust - Visa - USD

All cards use the same Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format to different bank accounts.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: These additional options can expedite the processing of credit card expenses.

New Field for Card Programmes

For clients using Worldline as their payment partner, a new optional field has been added to the Concur Expense user interface (UI) for some card programmes. This field is for future use only.

File Transfer Updates

**Ongoing** Mandatory SFTP with SSH Key Authentication

This release note is intended for technical staff responsible for file transmissions with SAP Concur products. For SAP Concur customers and suppliers participating in data exchange through various secure file transfer protocols, SAP is making changes that provide greater security for those file transfers.

As of 10 April, 2021, non-SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) protocols and SFTP password authentication are not allowed to connect to SAP Concur for file transfers:

  • Non-SFTP file transfer accounts must switch to SFTP with SSH Key Authentication.

  • SFTP file transfer accounts that use password authentication must switch to SSH key authentication.

  • SFTP password reset requests require the client to provide an SSH key for authentication.

On 12 April 2021, SAP started disabling non-compliant file transfer connections. The process of disabling non-compliant accounts will continue throughout 2021. If you have multiple file transfer connections configured, this change applies to all of your file transfer connections.

This announcement pertains to the following file transfer DNS endpoints:

  • st.concursolutions.com

  • st-eu.concursolutions.com

  • vs.concursolutions.com

  • vs.concurcdc.cn

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes provide greater security for file transfers.

**Ongoing** SAP Concur Legacy File Move Migration

This Release Note is intended for the technical staff responsible for file transmissions with SAP Concur. For our customers and suppliers participating in data exchange, SAP Concur is maintaining our file transfer subsystem to provide greater security for those file transfers.

SAP Concur is in the process of migrating entities that currently use a legacy process for moving files to a more efficient and secure file routing process that relies on APIs.

Clients whose entities are currently configured to use the legacy process will be migrated to the more efficient process sometime between now and 24 January 2022. After they are migrated to the more efficient process, clients will see the following improvement:

  • With the legacy process, clients had to wait for the file move schedule to run at a specified time. With the more efficient and secure API-based process, extracts and other outbound files from SAP Concur will be available within the existing overnight processing period shortly after the files are created.

This announcement pertains to the following file transfer DNS endpoints:

  • st.concursolutions.com

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes provide greater security and efficiency for file transfers.

Rotating PGP Key Available for File Transfers

Files transferred to SAP Concur products must be encrypted with the SAP Concur public PGP key, concursolutionsrotate.asc.

concursolutionsrotate.asc

  • Key file is available in client’s root folder

  • Key ID 40AC5D35

  • RSA 4096-bit signing and encryption subkey

  • Key expires every 2 years

  • Client is responsible for replacing the key before it expires

    • Next expiry date: 4 September 2022

    • SAP Concur plans to replace the current rotating public PGP key in the client’s root folder 90 days before the expiration date

The SAP Concur legacy PGP key (key ID D4D727C0) remains supported for existing clients but will be deprecated in the future.

SAP Concur strongly recommends that clients use the more secure rotating public PGP key for file transfers. To facilitate the use of the more secure rotating public PGP key for file transfers, SAP Concur added the key to existing client’s home folders on Friday 15 January 2021.

This announcement pertains to the following file transfer DNS endpoints:

  • st.concursolutions.com

  • mft-us.concursolutions.com

  • vs.concursolutions.com

  • st-eu.concursolutions.com

  • mft-eu.concursolutions.com

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The rotating public PGP key provides greater security for file transfers.

Localisation

Translations for Distribute Term (Traditional Chinese)

With the November release, SAP Concur is changing the following terms in the Traditional Chinese version of the SAP Concur user interface to bring consistency in translation of the term “Distribute”:

English Term

Current Translation

Updated Translation

Distribution/Distributions

發放

分攤

Distributed/Distribute

發放

分攤

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These revisions provide a more accurate translation and improved user experience.

Miscellaneous

**Ongoing ** SAP Concur Homepage Changes

In Q4, 2021, SAP Concur began redirecting clients to a new homepage. The appearance of the new homepage is identical to the previous SAP Concur homepage. The new homepage has enhanced functionality when services become temporarily unavailable.

The roll out of the new homepage is phased:

  • Phase 1: At the beginning of Q4, SAP Concur began redirecting Concur Expense, Concur Invoice and Concur Request clients in the US Datacentre to the new homepage.

  • Phase 2: In November 2021, SAP Concur will begin redirecting Concur Expense, Concur Invoice and Concur Request clients in the EU Datacentre to the new homepage.

  • Phase 3: In Q2 of 2022, SAP Concur will begin redirecting the remaining clients in the US and EU datacentres to the new homepage. The remaining clients include those with Concur Travel standalone or Concur Travel with Expense, Invoice and/or Request.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This change ensures that the SAP Concur homepage is available even when some services are unavailable and improves the consistency of the sign-in experience.

Concur Experience Optimiser (US)

On 27 October, SAP released Concur Experience Optimiser.

Concur Experience Optimiser collects and analyses employee sentiment and buying behaviour data from SAP Concur solutions, enabling clients to assess and make changes to improve the user experience, increase efficiency, better manage spending, help ensure compliance and better align with their sustainability goals.

Concur Experience Optimiser is available to clients who meet the following criteria:

  • The client has Concur Expense or Concur Travel & Expense.

  • The client has Concur Intelligence or Consultative Intelligence.

  • The client has licences for Qualtrics Employee XM for IT.

Concur Experience Optimiser includes the following features:

  • Diagnostic feedback templates to gather employee sentiment

  • Dashboards to analyse and understand data

  • Expert services to help interpret data and develop an effective response to findings

  • Qualtrics platform to ensure availability, scalability, confidentiality, data privacy and security

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: Concur Experience Optimiser helps clients to optimise their SAP Concur solutions to improve employee sentiment and efficiency, to help ensure compliance and to support client sustainability goals.

New Permission to Enable Preview of Fiori Light Theme

On 20 September 2021, a new permission, SAP Fiori Theme Preview, was added to the list of permissions in Concur Travel Professional edition. When the SAP Fiori Theme Preview permission is assigned to a user, the user sees a new switch in the header of their SAP Concur site. They will also see a New Theme info bubble.

The switch enables the user to switch from the SAP Concur standard theme to the SAP Fiori Theme. The info bubble displays a brief message about the switch.

The new theme includes changes to visual elements such as fonts, colours and icons. In addition, some top-level tabs and menu items are relocated to the SAP Concur Home menu. These changes are site-wide and apply to all of the user’s SAP Concur products.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: The SAP Fiori theme harmonises the look and feel of the SAP Concur UI with the look and feel of other SAP products, providing a more consistent user experience. The permission enables a client admin to allow designated users to preview and test the SAP Fiori theme.

NextGen UI

**Ongoing** Updated User Interface (UI) for Concur Expense End Users

The continued evolution of the Concur Expense solution user interface experience is the result of thoughtful design and research that provides a modern, intuitive and streamlined experience for creating and submitting expense claims.

Concur Expense customers are now strongly encouraged to preview and then move to the NextGen UI well before the automatic transition date of 1 October, 2022.

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

Payment Manager

"View Batch Data" Link

In Payment Manager, a new link, View Batch Data, displays to all Expense Pay clients. This link displays the masked payment and remittance data that is transmitted to the payment and/or card provider when applicable.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This functionality assists clients and SAP Concur with reconciliation issues.

SAP Concur User Assistance

Help Menu Directed to SAP Help Portal

SAP has updated the Help menu in the SAP Concur solutions to point to the online help content on the SAP Help Portal (http://help.sap.com). SAP Help Portal includes a new look and feel for the help and additional functionality, while the help content remains the same.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This update consolidates the SAP Concur solutions documentation with other SAP products on the central SAP Help Portal.

User Assistance

New User Assistance Tool for End Users (US, EMEA)

As of 4 November 2021, SAP Concur admins have the ability to enable a new user assistance tool for end users. The new tool helps end users learn and complete tasks more quickly by providing guided help.

On entities with admin user assistance enabled, user assistance for end users is enabled for all end users by default. User assistance for end users can be enabled and disabled by country/region or globally on the User Assistance Settings page.

SAP Concur clients who do not have admin user assistance enabled and who would like to have the ability to enable end user assistance can open a service ticket to enable the feature.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: User Assistance for End Users assists users to learn new tasks more quickly and efficiently, driving user adoption, increasing efficiency and improving the end user experience and end user satisfaction with SAP Concur solutions.

Web Services Administration

**Ongoing** Application Connector Username and Password Length Requirements Updated

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

To meet new security requirements, the length of the username and password associated with an application connector on the Application Connectors page must be at least 10 characters long and not more than 50 characters long.

Some clients currently have usernames and passwords configured that do not meet these parameters.

In Q1 2022, the 10-character minimum and 50-character maximum will be enforced. If the usernames and passwords are not updated prior to this change, some aspects of SAP Concur solutions might stop working. For example, workflow steps will not complete if using notifications, LEU windows will not open and there will be no results in fields using fetch lists.

To avoid disruption of callouts through application connections and subsequent disruption of some end-user tasks, SAP recommends updating your application connector username(s) and password(s) as soon as possible.

Application connection usernames and passwords can be updated by an administrator with the Company Administrator or Web Services Administrator role.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Enforcing password and username length restrictions improves the security standards for callouts made through the application connector.

Workflow

Authorised Approvers Sort Order Enhancement

Using the Automatically assign authorised approvers setting ensures that all Authorised Approval steps in the workflow are pre-populated with an assigned Authorised Approver. If there are multiple possible Authorised Approvers that could be assigned to a specific Authorised Approver workflow step, the system now orders the choices alphabetically by last name, followed by first name (if there is more than one person with the same last name) and selects the first choice from the alphabetised list.

Prior to this enhancement, the names were ordered by first name.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This change provides a consistent user experience.

Planned Change Summaries

The items in this section are summaries of the changes targeted for future releases. SAP Concur reserves the right to postpone implementation of – or completely remove – any enhancement/change mentioned here.

IMPORTANT: These Planned Changes may not be all of the upcoming enhancements and modifications that affect this SAP Concur product or service. The Planned Changes that apply to multiple SAP Concur products and/or services are in a consolidated document. Please review the additional Planned Changes admin summaries available in the November 2021 Shared Planned Changes Professional Edition Admin Summary.

Expense Pay Classic

**Planned Changes** Decommission of All Currencies

SAP Concur has been pursuing a multi-year effort to transition our portfolio of payment solutions to payment-provider-enabled solutions. This is evidenced by our existing Expense Pay Global solution with Bambora and planned Expense Pay Flex solution with Western Union Business Solutions.

Currently, SAP Concur is planning to decommission the legacy Expense Pay classic solution effective 01 January 2022. As we move into the next phase of our pay strategy via payment provider solutions, this decommission will require customers using Expense Pay classic to enable alternative solutions. Payments for Expense Pay classic for all currencies will discontinue to employees and credit card providers as of 15 December 2021. Customers using Expense Pay classic have been communicated with directly regarding this change.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This change is part of a transition to payment-provider-enabled solutions to support future product enhancements and richer integration.

SAP Integration With Concur Solutions

**Planned Changes** Delta Posting Phase 2 (Dec 2021)

This change is part of the NextGen UI experience for Professional edition clients.

The first phase of the Delta Posting feature allowed end-users to reopen the expense report and change custom fields only. Expanded features are now available, and multiple configuration levels allow companies to control which actions the end-user can perform in a reopened report.

Multiple configuration levels, 1 – 3, allow the choice of assigning increasing degrees of modification privileges to an Expense user group. For example, a user in a group assigned the level 1 permissions can add or append receipt images and modify allocation and org unit fields. However, a user in a group assigned level 3 permissions may further modify the report for number of attendees and amounts, add receipt images and move entries between reports.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This feature provides greater flexibility when assigning authority to change details to selected Expense groups and the changes end users in each group can make.

Site Settings

**Planned Changes** Enable Report Number in Concur Expense Accounting Extracts

A new site setting, Enable Report Number for Expense Accounting Extracts, will be available in an upcoming release in Q1 of 2022 for all Concur Expense accounting extract file types. This setting lets the client elect to extract the Report Number field data instead of the Report Key field data by changing the extract output to include one and not the other. This change is reversible and can affect up to no more than 5 same-type extracts at the client site.

The result of this change is to extract the report number data in preference to the report key data, benefiting the client by including more meaningful output and aligning the extract process with future release improvements.

This functionality supports up to 5 same type accounting extracts as listed below:

  • Standard Accounting extract v.2

  • Standard Accounting extract v.3

  • Expense Pay/Employee Reimbursement extract

  • Informational extract

  • Any customised extract that incorporates the Report Key field

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This feature prepares the client who is using accounting extracts for a change to field availability and supports future feature enhancements for extracts.

Client Notifications

The items in this section provide reference material for all clients.

Accessibility Updates

SAP implements changes to better meet current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Information about accessibility-related changes made to SAP Concur solutions is published on a quarterly basis. You can review the quarterly updates on the Accessibility Updates (English only) page.

SAP Concur Non-Affiliated Subprocessors

The list of non-affiliated subprocessors is available here: SAP Concur list of Subprocessors (English Only)

Supported Browsers

Supported browsers are available with the other SAP Concur monthly release notes, accessible from What's New - Professional Edition