Accessibility

With the March release, SAP Concur announced that the Working for Others Quick Help became accessible via the keyboard.

To clarify, that means a user can use the Tab key to access the icon and then the spacebar or Enter key to access the Quick Help information.

Admin

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

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.

In the March release notes, we described the updates to the Users by Browser report.

Be aware that the updated report is currently available only to customers using the North America data centre. The report will be updated for customers in the remaining data centres in a future release.

Audit Rules

For clients who use the Concur Drive feature, SAP Concur now provides an enhanced ability to configure mileage-related audit rules for data expensed via this feature.

With this release, two new fields are available: Allow Maps and Route Source. With these new fields, it is possible to configure custom audit rules for the following situations:

• Drive Not Used: When a user claims a Personal Car Mileage expense and they have not used Drive, they are forced to enter a comment.
• Drive Policy Reminder: When a user has not used Drive, they are reminded by a warning exception message.
• Mileage Route Required: When a user does not have a mapped route, they are presented with an exception instructing them to add a route.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These new data fields give admins greater visibility into and control over how mileage is expensed by their users.

Budget

Clients can view new budget functionality and enhancements in the new Budget Release Notes which are located on the same page as the other product release notes.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Standalone release notes provide greater visibility for Concur Budget.

Concur's Platform - Upgrade Postponed

SAP Concur has postponed the previously scheduled maintenance (Monday, 16th April at 10:00 a.m. PST) of the servers that support the Concur Platform Callouts.

More information will be available in future Release Notes.

Expense Pay

Expense Pay – Global for Expense now supports the following credit card programmes for the Canadian Dollar (CAD $):

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

In-Product Messaging (IPM)

Last year, when in-product messaging was introduced in Europe, the feature included the ability for users to opt out of messaging.

With this release, SAP Concur will provide customers in the United States the ability to opt out.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Users in the United States can opt out of in-product messaging.

Japan Public Transport (JPT)

The IC Card Reader solution will switch authentication processes during the weekend of 14 and 15 April, 2018.

The scheduled maintenance times are as follows:

• Saturday, 14th April, 2018 from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Japan Time (Friday, 13th April, 2018 from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. PDT)
• Sunday, 15th April, 2018 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Japan Time (Saturday 14th April, 2018 from 8:00 p.m. to 0:00 a.m. PDT)

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change will simplify user activation and allow transactions to show more quickly in Available Expenses.

The Japan Public Transportation (JPT) database of stations and lines received routine maintenance changes such as additions, name changes and removals.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Lists in Expense continue to reflect JPT's current stations and lines.

Next Generation (NextGen) 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.

Over the next year, customers will have the ability to preview and then opt in to NextGen Expense before the mandatory cutover date.

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.

Travel Allowance

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change maintains correct calculations.

Updates have been made to the rules for determining the travel allowance location. The following rules no longer apply:

• Allowance location is based on the last international location visited if there is a minimum of 10 hours of international travel in a 24-hour day.
• If the international time spent does not meet the minimum of 10 hours, the domestic allowance rate is used.

For both the above scenarios, the day ending in transit departing from a foreign location is also considered.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change maintains correct calculations.

(Poland) Option "Use Border Cross Time" Is Now Available

The country-specific option, User Border Cross Time, is now available for the Travel Allowance Poland feature.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides greater functionality for users of the Travel Allowance Poland feature.

Admin

More information will be available in future Release Notes.

For customers who currently display the Privacy Agreement page to users, be aware that – targeted for May – SAP Concur will eliminate that page. That means the privacy agreement will no longer display under any circumstances. In addition, the options to customise the privacy agreement text and to apply policy (for example, to require that a user accept the privacy agreement) will be removed.

In a separate release, SAP Concur will provide a standard privacy statement, which can be accessed via a link in the page footer.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The intent of the change is to ensure that all customers see the same unmodified SAP Concur privacy statement.

In the release note named **Planned Changes** Removing the "Privacy Agreement" Page, we describe changes that will occur when the current customisable privacy policy is discontinued. We also discuss the new Privacy Statement that SAP Concur will provide as a requirement of being a "processor" of customer data.

The intent is to replace all occurrences of customised or unique policy text – in all SAP Concur products and the mobile app – with the SAP Concur Processor Privacy Statement, which describes our processing activities of customer data.

Be aware that the new text will be available soon, targeted for May.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The intent of the change is to ensure that all customers see the same unmodified SAP Concur privacy statement.

Company Card

In an upcoming release, users of Yodlee will be able to work with transaction data from the Income and Transfer categories. Currently, transactions falling into either of these categories are set as undefined and hidden by the system. With the upcoming change, these transactions will now be correctly categorised for the client.

Please note that this feature enhancement will still filter out transactions categorised as payment or account settlement because they are not expense-claim related. As the integration is based on an individual registration, the end user would delete what is not eligible to expense claim reimbursement.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement extends the scope of what flows into Concur allowing clients to process their card transactions by bringing support for the missing Income and Transfer categories to the Expense product.

Data Retention

This new feature will allow clients to control how long Concur stores their data based on who, when and where criteria.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature gives clients the ability to meet their specific compliance needs regarding data retention.

New Filter

A 23-month filter will be included with the new Data Retention feature. The filter will impact the following areas:

• Available Expenses
• View Transactions
• Unassigned Cash Advances

This new feature will automatically filter older transactions. The 23-month time is not configurable. Clients who opt to enable the new Data Retention feature automatically turn on the 23-month filter.

Under View Transactions, statement periods older than 23 months will also be filtered out.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This filter will reduce the accumulation of unprocessed transactions over time and support the new Data Retention feature.

Plain Text File Transfer Protocol

Concur is announcing the End of Support for plain text FTP as a means to transfer data to and from Concur.

Plain text FTP is not a secured protocol and has inherent security vulnerabilities. On 15 May 2018, Concur Operations will apply a security update to our File Transfer infrastructure, restricting the use of plain text FTP as a part of our ongoing commitment to securing our customers’ data and meeting the audited security requirements of the "Concur Trust Platform".

For more information, refer to the Plain Text FTP Retirement FAQ (English Only).

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Transfer of data to and from Concur using plain text FTP after the End of Support date will result in a failure of incoming connections. Clients using plain text FTP must utilise one of the approved secured methods to continue transferring data as outlined in the File Transfer User Guide. This change is required on the client side, and Concur is available to support these efforts.

Client Notifications

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

Monthly browser certifications, both current and planned, are available with the other Concur monthly release notes, accessible from What's New - Professional Edition