Integrating with SAP Concur

Travel expenses can be responsible for a significant part of the budget consumption. As such SAP Concur integrates seamlessly with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Sector Management (PSM) in order to control those travel expenses. This means that planned or realized expenses check budget and are visible in PSM Commitment and Actual reporting. The budget control checks and updates are triggered by Concur document workflow.

The following slides describe a typical business story for an employee planning, authorizing and managing trip expenses:

1. An employee is planning to travel for 2 weeks and submits a request with estimated expenses.
2. "Funds Check" is sent to PSM to determine if there are funds available for the trip (Budget Availability Control (AVC) is called).
3. Because the Funds Check was successful, the request is sent to the manager for approval, and the trip is approved.
4. The travel request is sent to PSM to ensure the funds are reserved for this trip (AVC and Updating).
5. Because the reservation of the budget for the trip was successful, the request is now approved.
6. The employee travels and tracks their expenses in their expense report, which they submit upon return.
7. "Funds Check" is sent to SAP to ensure that the actual spend is within the tolerance levels of the PSM AVC. As the "Funds Check" was successful the expense report is approved for payment.
8. When the expense report is paid, the payment is drawn from the reserved budget Reservation made in Step 4. Any additional funds in the reservation remain.
9. The employee is reimbursed, and the request is automatically or manually closed. Because all linked expense reports are paid, a "Funds Release" is sent to PSM for this travel request. Any remaining funds reserved for this trip are closed (returned to the available budget).

The next two images show screenshots of the PSM account assignments within a travel request and the result of the budget availability checking in the concur audit trail.

The following describes the technical back ground of the integration:

Like the document chain in procurement, concur supports a similar document chain with three different budget consumption types:

• Travel Requests are updated in PSM with the budget consumption type 52 "Travel Request Pre-encumbrances"
• Expense Report Obligations are updated in PSM with the budget consumption type 53 "Travel Request Pre-encumbrances". Expense Report Obligations can reduce commitments created by the travel request.
• The Expense Reports are updated as normal FI documents in PSM (budget consumption type 99). Expense Reports can reduce Expense Report Obligations (if they exist) or Travel Requests (if they exist) .

This leads to three supported scenarios, which are supported to be configured in SAP Concur:

1. Commitment creation based on a Travel Request (TR)followed up by the actuals posting based on the Expense Report
2. Commitment creation based on the Expense Report (ER) as Expense Report Obligation followed up by the actuals posting based on the Expense Report

   Reasons given for commitments based on Expense Reports (ERs):

   1. Long delays between ER submission and final approval (sometimes weeks)
   2. The need to always have a commitment before an actual posting
3. Commitment creation based on a Travel Request followed up by commitment updates based on the Expense Report (Obligation)followed up by the actuals posting based on the Expense Report

• Commitments are created per concur allocation (multiple account assignment combinations are possible)
• The Posting Date (and as a result the first budget consumption date in PSM) can be configured, e.g. as trip start or end date, document submission date …There will be only 1 Posting Date per Travel Request/Expense ReportOtherwise refer to generic commitment updating class
• Travel Request-based commitments are based on gross amounts

  Reason: Tax isn't calculated on Travel Requests.

• Expense Report-based commitments are based on net amounts.
• Commitments are consumed by amount, e.g. if an Expense Report expense is lower than estimated on the Travel Request, then the Travel Request-based commitment isn't fully consumed.

  Reason: A Travel Request entry can be referenced by several Expense Report entries.

• A Release is triggered by Concur to clean-up remaining commitments, e.g. if a Travel Request is closed
• AVC is not performed synchronously, which mean that despite an AVC error the concur document has been persisted (but cannot be processed any further). However the update in PSM will not be performed.
• Unsuccessful obligation documents (e.g. as a result of a failed AVC checking) are routed to the Integration Manager for resolution

Usually the integration between SAP Concur and SAP S/4HANA Cloud is processed automatically in the back-end. To activate the integration, the standard user CONF_EXPERT_BUS_NET_INT (Role ….) must configure via the "Concur Integration Setup".

The following slides show the Integration Set-up: