Admin

For companies who use the e-Bunsho feature, a new administrative role has been added to Concur. The new role, Digital Compliance Administrator, enables a user to access the E-Bunsho Timestamp validation tool.

BEFORE

For companies who have enabled the e-Bunsho feature, the tool was available to admins who had at least one of these processor roles:

• Expense Processor

• Expense Processor (Audit)

• Expense Processor Manager

AFTER

Now, admins no longer need one of the previously mentioned processor roles.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change allows company admins to access the page.

Concur Open is the SAP Concur service status dashboard, which displays known and widespread outages and incidents for select SAP Concur services and all data centres. Concur Open displays the current service status as well as incident history for the past 20 days.

Personalised Concur Open became available on 11 September.

With the release, there will be new functionality added to Concur Open. SAP Concur users will be able to log in to a personalised view of Concur Open and:

• View service status for the services and the data centre that are specific to their company

• Access subscription options for updates about the incidents that affect the services specific to their company

• View service history for the past two years as well as detailed root cause analysis information and the actions taken by SAP Concur for specific incidents

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Customers use Concur Open to monitor their SAP Concur services outages, status and availability. Adding this new functionality will provide customers with a personalised view of their service status and availability. SAP Concur's goal is to provide a more accurate and transparent view of incidents/outages.

Financial Integration

SAP has updated the financial integration between Concur Expense/Concur Invoice and SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA to support importing the following new types of cost objects to Concur:

• Maintenance Order

• Production Order

• Quality Management Order

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update provides more cost objects for clients in the logistics area.

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.

Plain Text FTP

SAP Concur announced the End of Support for plain text FTP to transfer data to and from SAP Concur in November 2017. SAP Concur provided clients an extension until 1 September 2018 to complete their transition to secure FTP protocols.

Plain text FTP is not a secured protocol and has inherent security vulnerabilities. On 1 September 2018, SAP Concur Operations applied 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 SAP Concur Trust Platform.

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

SAP Concur's Platform

SAP Concur is upgrading the servers that support the SAP Concur Platform Callouts. This maintenance includes the Production Proxy Migration and PWS Server Migration to VM.

The North American Data Centre update has been completed. The EMEA Data Centre PWS Server Migration to VM is completed, and the Production Proxy Migration is estimated to be completed on 31 October, 2018.

These servers support the following functionality:

• Fetch Attendee Data Callout

• Fetch List Item Callout

• Event Notification Callout

• Launch External URL Callout

• Concur Salesforce Connector

Be aware that this maintenance means that for any customer callout URLs, SAP Concur has the following requirements:

• The endpoint is secured with SSL/TLS.

• The endpoint uses a minimum of TLS 1.0, but TLS 1.2 is preferred.

• The endpoint must employ Diffie-Hellman cipher suites with key sizes >1024 bits.

• Due to the ever-evolving world of SSL and standards, we do not publish a specific list of permitted cipher suites, but we generally advise that a modern industry supported list is utilised.

• The endpoint must present an SSL certificate with a chain to a valid root that can be verified. If the chain cannot be verified without installing additional certificates, the calls from SAP Concur will fail.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This maintenance will mitigate the out-of-warranty issue with our current hardware.

Travel Allowance

Concur has created a new system calculation property to turn on updates for the 22 June 2018 government rate changes. The name of the new system calculation property is multiday_partial_trip_new_rules.

Enabling the new system calculation property results in the following changes to foreign and domestic trip rates:

FOREIGN TRIPS

DOMESTIC TRIPS

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change helps SAP Concur clients maintain legal compliance.

Uploading Receipt Images

Users no longer have the option to upload scanned images of receipts that are formatted as HTML files.

Users will continue to be able to upload receipt images that use the following file formats: PNG, JPG, JPEG, PDF, TIF and TIFF.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change closes a security gap and allows SAP Concur to devote more resources to features that are used by many or most of our clients.

Admin

Admins can now pre-configure Expense Assistant options.

Expense Assistant can automatically create trip-based expense claims and add trip-based expenses to these expense claims. Currently, Expense Assistant automatically creates monthly expense claims as a client's expenses flow into Concur. This is known as creating a calendar-based expense claim.

With this enhancement, Expense Assistant can create either of two types of expense claims: calendar-based and trip-based. When Expense Assistant creates a trip-based expense claim, Expense Assistant will automatically create an expense claim based on a specific trip booked in Concur Travel and will populate the expense claim with the client's expenses that occur between the trip's start and end dates.

Users using Expense Assistant will only be able to have Expense Assistant automatically create calendar-based or trip-based expense claims, not both types of expense claims.

The type of expense claims created by Expense Assistant will be defined at the group level.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature automates more of the expense reporting process, to provide an easier end user experience.

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