The Offline Travel Expenses application allows you to enter and edit trips and receipts offline regardless of location, using mobile devices (Notebooks). You do not need a connection to the SAP R/3 system. This application is of particular use for employees that are regularly away from the office on business trips and that cannot always have a connection to the SAP R/3 system.

The user can enter trips and receipts offline and save them on their Notebook. They can then transfer these trips to SAP R/3 when they next have access to the online R/3 system.

The user can synchronize the trips they create using Offline Travel Expenses with SAP R/3 at any time. Once the data has been transferred to the SAP R/3 system, it can be processed in the same way as trips and receipts created using the normal online Travel Management interface. Offline Travel Expenses uses the same business logic and the same database tables as the other user interfaces for Travel Management. At the end of the process, the travel expense information is processed in SAP R/3 and then transferred to the Travel Management components.

You must have SAP R/3 Release 4.6C or higher.

R/3 Travel Management must be completely set up. In particular, the Customizing settings for individual field control for individual entry must be maintained.

Offline Travel Expenses can be implemented with the CATS Notebook. You can switch from one function to the other. Both applications use the same information and the same Input help values.

You can create, change and extend trips as well as enter and change receipts. When entering receipts you can decide whether to assign these receipts directly to a trip created on or offline, or whether to enter the receipt separately and assign it to a trip at a later point in time. The checks you are familiar with from the travel expenses manager, such as required fields, overlapping trips, and standard Customizing settings are also available to you in Offline Travel Expenses.

If you start synchronization with the R/3 system, offline trip data is compared with the data in the R/3 system using a simple two-way synchronization process.

Constraints

Offline Travel Expenses cannot check data in the same way as data for user interfaces that are continuously connected to the SAP System. This means that data that has been accepted by the offline application may still lead to error messages being generated when the data is synchronized with the SAP System. As SAP R/3 transfers these check results to the Notebook, these errors can be resolved and the corrected data can be transferred to R/3 when the next synchronization process takes place.