Business Purpose

[DanaV]

Is there a way to keep the Business Purpose from Pre-Filling from the last transaction you entered?

[bwood]

I had the same issue. It's considered by Concur to be a helpful feature, rather than the annoyance that it was to me.

The support team help to create a new required field called "Company Name Business Purpose" and mapped it to the memo(description) field in our software. Then the support team hid the Business Purpose, although it comes back from time to time, but the new field overrides the Business Purpose field.

[KevinD]

@bwood in my opinion, they did more than what was needed as you could have just had them turn off the copy down for that field. I think it is a fairly common enough request that they could have done it without the need to create a new required field. Just my opinion. 🙂

[DanaV]

Totally agree.  Very annoying and leaves room for mistakes to be made.

[PoojaKumatkar]

Hi @DanaV ,

For the same expense type, you can use the "Copy" option available in your expense report. This feature is particularly useful when you need to create multiple expense entries of the same type.

Example:
Suppose you're creating an "Airfare" expense entry for the first time with a specific business purpose. >> Save

Instead of manually creating another similar expense entry, you can use the "Copy" option. The system will generate a duplicate of the selected expense with the transaction date set to the next day. All details, including the business purpose, will be carried over from the original entry. You can then modify any necessary fields in the copied entry as needed.

The Copy option is not useful when creating expense entries for different expense types, as each expense type is linked to a different backend form. Therefore, it is technically not feasible to carry over the business purpose from one expense entry to another with a different expense type.

While it is technically possible to default the business purpose from the expense report header to the expense entry level, this approach is not recommended. The business purpose may vary depending on the expense type, and auto-populating it could lead to incorrect or inconsistent data.

Please note that implementing this change would require backend form field-level configuration.

If this answers your query then please mark solution as accepted.

[bwood]

Hi Pooja,

This solution would be helpful as an end user.

Concur had turned on the copy from previous expense for the Business Purpose Field, as they thought that it would be helpful, and did not want to turn that off. I got tired of answering the VP's questions about how come there were telephone charges in the meals, travel etc. Just created more work for me to track down why these expenses looked like they were in the wrong accounts when they were actually in the correct accounts. Because the Business Purpose Field was required, and it had data, the alerts weren't created to enter the description in the Business purpose field.

This is why I created the "Company Name Business Purpose" field that didn't automatically copy from previous entries and made it a required field so that my end users would need to enter the appropriate description before they could submit the report.

[KevinD]

@DanaV if you have the correct access to Forms and Fields, you can simply set the copy down option for this field to "None". Someone with the correct access could turn this off in about...oh...30 seconds. 

If you don't have access to forms and fields, submit a help ticket to Concur Support and request it be turned off.