Accessibility

In June of 2017, accessibility tests for the June 2017 VPAT identified exceptions to the WCAG 2.0 global standards of the W3. These exceptions are identified issues where the location or action did not adhere to the A or AA standard of specific WCAG 2.0 rules. Resolving this issue improves our accessibility quality on the targeted location or action by aligning it to the appropriate WCAG standard.

Effectively, the issue and resolution is this: Screen readers are a type of assistive technology that audibly reads each screen element (instructional text, fields, options, etc.) to the user. Proper coding (in this case, known as alternative text or alt text) is required to ensure the reader “reads” the proper information to the user.

The issue is that the logo on the Sign In page does not currently have the proper code to read the logo description to the user. In this release, this issue will be resolved.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Enhancing our products and services to better align to the accessible standards of WCAG 2.0 increases the ability of all Concur users.

The Working for Others Quick Help contains important information and should be available to everyone. Currently, it is available only by clicking the "?" icon with a mouse. With this release, the Working for Others Quick Help will become accessible via the keyboard.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Working for Others Quick Help will be available to mouse users and keyboard users.

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.

The Users by Browser report has been updated to include more information – all in one place. It now lists all users as well as their browsers and login count.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The admin no longer has to generate a report for each browser. All users are listed in one report.

Budget

The Budget feature enables clients to set up all components of a budget; a fiscal year to determine the budget period, budget tracking fields to track spending on a cost centre (profit centre) level, budget categories to group expense types for budget purposes and budgets, which are the actual annual budgets, and Budget Items, which define the budget including fiscal year, budget owner, budget name and description.

This feature makes budgets visible, actionable and real-time for approvers and budget owners, leading to high-quality spending decisions for Expense clients.

In addition, the Budget feature is available for the Concur mobile app for Expense. Please note that the release for the Concur mobile app occurs seven to ten days after the regular release.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature makes budgets visible, actionable, and real-time for approvers and budget owners, leading to high-quality spending decisions for Expense clients.

Expense Pay

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

• Capital One MasterCard USD

• PNC Bank Visa USD

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

For all users who opt in to receive payments via Expense Pay, both Expense Pay – Global and classic Expense Pay, the term "agree" has been changed to "authorise" in the Concur User Interface (UI).

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides greater legal clarity for the instruction that users authorise direct deposits from Concur for classic Expense Pay or a Concur payment-processing partner for Expense Pay - Global.

Legacy Expense Authorisation Request

As preparation for the impending retirement of the legacy Expense Authorisation Request feature, as part of the 17 March, 2018 release, the ability to modify the setting to control creation of legacy Authorisation Requests has been made read-only on the Expense Policy page.

Concur plans to retire our legacy Expense Authorisation Request feature on 31 March, 2018.Client-facing FAQ (English Only).

Concur plans to retire our legacy Expense Authorisation Request feature on 31 March 2018.

Concur offered this feature to some clients prior to the existence of the standalone Concur Request product. We now have feature parity as well as enhanced features and full support on the standalone Request product. Clients that wish to leverage a request capability within Concur should purchase and migrate to the Concur Request product.

Client-facing FAQ (English Only).

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This retirement allows Concur to focus development resources on further enhancements to our standalone Concur Request product whose functionality, innovation and value now exceeds that of our legacy feature.

Next Generation (NextGen)

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.

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

Before this change, when customers using both COMP and GOVT rates deducted meals, it was discovered that the proper percentages set up in the Calculation Properties were being used for COMP rates, however they were not being used for the GOVT rates. The taxable/non-taxable calculation was not correct.

After this change, both COMP rates and GOVT rates are deducted as specified in the calculation property for partial days. The above limit (taxable amount) calculated is correct when calculation property use_govt_meal_deduction_for_both_config is enabled.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement provides correct calculations.

Currently, when the use_24_hour_day_separation enhancement is enabled, domestic segments from the first day of mixed travel and the immediate next day of mixed travel are merged.

In order to disable this domestic segment merge, a new calculation property has been introduced: disable_domestic_merge_for_24_hour_day_separation.

When this property is checked, the domestic merge will no longer take place.

This new setting applies to 24-hour day calculations and requires the use_24_hour_day_separation property to be enabled, to take effect.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The new calculation property will give client Admins the option to disable the merge of the domestic segments of travel. Instead of the merge, these segments of travel will continue to be a part of the separate 24-hour day calculation logic.

Value Added Tax (VAT)

Concur has updated Value Added Tax (VAT) rates in accordance with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) Advisory Fuel Rates (AFRs).

Changes for petrol vehicle types:

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Businesses maintain best-practice tax compliance.

Accessibility

This release note has been removed but will be included for a future release.

Admin

This release note has been removed but will be included for a future release.

For clients who currently display the Privacy Agreement page to users, be aware that on 14 April, 2018, 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, Concur will provide a standard privacy statement, which can be accessed via a link in the page footer.

This release note discusses the removal of the Privacy Agreement page and its associated configuration options. Information about the new Concur privacy statement will be provided in future release notes.

The intent of the change is to ensure that all customers see the same unmodified Concur privacy statement.

Company Card

In an upcoming release, clients moving to the GL-1022 American Express card feed can expect enhanced handling of the “American Express Initiated Activity” data to match that of the GL-1025 feed. With this upcoming change, data will yield values for Merchant Name and/or Supplier Name instead of returning a “No Supplier Supplied” message.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement updates the GL-1022 data reconciliation to match the behaviour of the GL-1025 card feed, as requested by our Brazilian clients adopting the GL-1022 feed.

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.

In-Product Messaging

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

In a future release, Concur will provide customers in the United States the ability to opt out.

Japan Public Transport (JPT)

The IC Card Reader solution will switch authentication processes during the weekend of 14 and 15 April, 2018. The maintenance time will be provided in a future version of these release notes.

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

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