Concur Invoice Professional Edition Administration Help

September 2020 Expense Professional Edition Admin Summary

Initial Post

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

**Ongoing** Deprecation of Director SAML Service and Migration to SAML v2

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

Support for the Director SAML service is being deprecated. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and SAP Concur personnel will soon begin assisting customers who currently use Director SAML to migrate to SAP Concur SAML v2 SSO (SAML v2).

Clients currently using Director SAML are encouraged to migrate to SAML V2 as soon as possible.

Deprecation of support for the Director SAML service is dependent on the following requirements:

  • SAP Concur technicians and TMCs assist existing SAP Concur clients to migrate from the Director SAML service to SAML V2.

  • All clients that currently rely on the Director SAML service have migrated from Director SAML to SAML V2.

Migration from Director SAML to SAML V2 requires the following general steps:

  • The client identifies an admin to act as the SSO admin and assigns the proper permission/role.

  • The SSO admin coordinates with their SAP Concur technician to obtain the SAP Concur SP metadata.

  • The SSO admin configures the SSO settings at the IdP based on information from SP metadata.

  • The SSO admin retrieves IdP metadata from the IdP and delivers the metadata to the SAP Concur technician.

  • The SSO admin adds a few testing users and tests the new SSO connection.

  • With successful testing, the company rolls out SSO to their SAP Concur users.

For more detailed information about migrating to SAML v2, refer to the SSO Service: Overview Guide (English Only) and the Shared: SSO Management Setup Guide (English Only).

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

**Ongoing** Deprecation of HMAC and Migration to SAML v2 and the SSO Self-Service Tool

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

SAP Concur support for Hash-Based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) is being deprecated. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and SAP Concur personnel are currently assisting customers who use HMAC to migrate to SAP Concur SAML v2 SSO (SAML v2).

In Q3 of 2020, SAP Concur plans to provide a self-service tool that will enable client admins to set up their SAML v2 connections without involving an SAP Concur support representative.

The HMAC deprecation includes two phases:

PHASE I:

  • Clients must have an identity provider (IdP) or a custom SAML 2.0 compliant solution.

  • Clients begin testing authentication using SAML v2.

  • TMCs prepare to onboard new SAP Concur clients to SAML v2.

  • Once the SSO self-service 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 to SAML v2.

  • Existing clients using HMAC must migrate to SAML v2.

PHASE II:

  • TMCs have migrated all existing SAP Concur clients from the HMAC service to SAML v2.

  • The HMAC service is deprecated. Phase II is targeted to end mid-year in 2021.

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

Company Bill Statements

Weekly Statement Report Creation Notification

Purchasing card owners now receive a weekly email notification that summarises all Company Bill Statement reports automatically created for each import of purchasing card transactions during the week. The weekly email summary is sent on Thursdays at 2:00 AM Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and cannot be turned off. For example, a user in the Pacific Standard Time (PST) time zone will receive the email on Wednesday evening.

Additionally, email reminders are now sent weekly until reports are submitted.

Previously, card owners received one email notification sent directly after each import of new transactions. The new weekly summary notification replaces the previous notification process.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change harmonises the autocreation process of reports and provides the same timing and template for email notification as Expense Assistant.

File Transfer Updates

**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 will begin 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 the end of 2020. 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.

Financial Integration

SAP Integration with Concur Solutions (ICS) Adding Delta Posting

We have updated the SAP Integration with Concur Solutions (ICS) to allow delta posting of previously posted expense claims. The initial feature set will allow end users to recall posted expense claims. For the initial release, the end user can modify only the custom fields on the expense claim (claim header, entry, itemisation and allocation level), then resubmit it. The resubmitted expense claim goes through the approval workflow again, and when approved it is reposted to the SAP ERP.

This functionality is available for clients using the NextGen UI for Concur Expense Professional Edition, with ICS for the following SAP ERPs:

  • SAP ECC

  • SAP S/4HANA

  • SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature allows end users to submit expense claims with temporary cost object information and update them later without delaying reimbursement. This feature handles the reversal of the original posting and ensures the final posting includes any corrections to the expense claim.

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 have the ability to preview and then opt in to the NextGen UI before the mandatory move.

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.

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 September 2020 Shared Planned Changes Professional Edition Admin Summary.

Expense Pay

**Planned Changes** (Egypt) Updated Bank Account Number Field

To accommodate changes to the Egyptian banking system, Concur Expense will modify the Bank Account Number field in two ways:

  • The character limit of the field will increase from 20 characters to 29 characters.

  • The field will be renamed from Bank Account Number to IBAN.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides end users with the ability to enter an IBAN number into their profile to ensure that payments are not rejected by Egypt's banking system.

Travel Allowance Service

**Planned Changes** Calculation Option for Multiple Trips Sharing One Day

For clients using the new Travel Allowance Service, SAP Concur plans to provide new calculation options for multiple trips sharing one day.

In some countries, if multiple independent trips occur on the same date, then the total travel time from each trip is added together to determine a single travel allowance for the date. This is new functionality for the Travel Allowance service.

The new functionality enables clients to define the behaviour of two itineraries sharing the same date; for example, when the user ends one trip in the morning and starts another trip later that same day.

OPTIONS:

  • Separate – Concur Expense calculates the amount for each trip separately.

    • Example 1: If a user had four hours of one trip and six hours of another, the user receives a four-hour allowance and a six-hour allowance.

    • Example 2: If a user had a domestic and a foreign trip, the user receives both allowances, the domestic allowance and the foreign allowance.

  • Cumulative – Concur Expense adds the hours of each trip together and then calculates the allowance based on that total.

    • Example 1: If a user had four hours of one trip and six hours of another, the user receives a ten-hour allowance.

    • Example 2: If a user had a domestic and a foreign trip, the user receives the allowance that is the highest, i.e. the foreign allowance.

The configured adjustments will be displayed for users in the Reimbursement Details view of the Travel Allowance Adjustments page.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This functionality is an enhancement to allow for special calculations in cases where multiple trips occur on one day in a travel allowance itinerary.

Client Notifications

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

SAP Concur Non-Affiliated Subprocessors

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

Monthly Browser Certifications

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