Invoice

Field Validation Enhancement

Invoice has enhanced the field validation message when clients submit a payment request that is missing a field value. Clients are now informed which field has an incorrect value including the line item number if the issue is at the line item or at the allocation level.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This enhancement makes it easier for clients to correct a field value.

Spend Categories

Goodwill and Airline Fees Spend Categories Removed

With this release, Concur has removed the Goodwill and Airline Fees spend categories in the Expense Types tool, which means that clients will no longer see these options. Instead, clients should use the Donations and Agent/Booking Fees spend categories.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This enhancement cleans up the list of spend categories.

Purchase Requests

Approval and Send Back Email Reminder Link Routes to Purchase Request

Clients who receive emails about a purchase request pending approval are taken directly to the purchase request in question. If the purchase request has already been processed, clients will now also be taken directly to that purchase request instead of the page listing all purchase requests.

This enhancement also applies to email notifications about purchase requests that have been sent back.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This enhancement makes it easier for clients to navigate directly to purchase requests that generated an alert regardless of their status.

Budget

New Budget Feature in Early Adopter Programme

This feature is available to Early Adopter clients only. Budget will be a phased release starting in March with availability to all clients targeted in Q2.

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.

In addition, the Budget feature is available for the Concur mobile app for Invoice and is part of the Early Adopter Programme. 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 Invoice (payment requests and purchase requests) clients.

Miscellaneous

Reminder: No Personal or Sensitive Data in Custom Fields

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.

Planned Changes

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

**Planned Change** Opt Out of In-Product Messaging (United States)

Last year, when in-product messaging was introduced in Europe, the feature included the ability for users to opt out of In-Product Messaging (IPM).

Targeted for the March release, Concur will provide customers in the United States the ability to opt out.

**Planned Change** New Feature for Outdated Data

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

**Planned Change** Support for Plain Text FTP to End on 15 May 2018

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".

**Planned Change** Accessibility: Keyboard Access for Working for Others Quick Help

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 the March 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.

**Planned Change** Accessibility: Alternative Text for the Logo on the Sign In Page

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.

A screen reader is 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 the March 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.

**Planned Change** Accessibility: Remove All Instances of ‘ConcurAccessible’

ConcurAccessible is a feature that provides certain accessibility features. However, with the many accessibility enhancements we have been making, ConcurAccessible has become obsolete and is no longer used. In addition, it can create inconsistent UI behaviour for users. Therefore, with the March release, all ConcurAccessible components will be removed from Concur.

Business Purpose/Client Benefit: This ensures a consistent, better experience for all users.

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