Employee Import Processing Order

[brandtp09]

Is there an order being followed when the Job for the Employee Import runs? We have recently uploaded a 320 File manually in our Employee Import and we noticed that it got processed last unlike in the past where it usually gets processed before the 305 Files. Does the Employee Import follow an alphabetical order?

[KevinD]

@brandtp09 I've posted this question internally to see how the system determines which order to run jobs in. I'll let you know if I hear something.

[brandtp09]

Thanks @KevinD! Please keep me posted! 🙂

Regards,

Brandt

[KevinD]

@brandtp09 there is an order and it is not alphabetical. I've pasted it below.

[brandtp09]

For Employee Import, we have 320 Files and 305 Files. Which one does Concur process first?

Regards,

Brandt

[CMeierhofer · Accepted solution]

@brandtp09 

I haven't had this problem with manual imports yet, as I always checked the box "Select to run this uploaded file immediately (excludes any files already in the import directory)." The import then always started immediately.

As KevinD wrote, there is a sequence for job processing, which is described exactly in the Knowledge Base article 000092117 "What is the sequence of the job processing through ONP?".

The current order described there is as follows:

1. Payment Hold
2. Payment Vendor Import
3. Extract
4. Custom Extract
5. Image Delivery Extract
6. Expense Pay Reimbursement
7. Analysis Extract
8. Payment Request Import
9. Request Assignment Timeout
10. Billing
11. List Import
12. Validation Import
13. Employee Import
14. Exchange Rates
15. Amex 1205 Loader
16. Credit Card Feed
17. Employee Daily Export to Travel
18. Expense Payment Confirmation
19. Location Import
20. Travel Allowance Import
21. Tax Import
22. GSA
23. Taxability Import
24. Vendor Payment Confirmation
25. Attendee Import
26. Authorization Request Expire
27. Email Reminder
28. Approval Time Expire
29. Request Expire
30. Archive
31. Employee Travel Points Feedback
32. Data Warehouse Expense Archive
33. Data Warehouse Gov Exp Archive
34. Data Warehouse Travel Archive
35. Purchase Order
36. Reporting DB Dump
37. Data Dump Extract
38. Purchase Receipt

Note: Depending on your system configuration, not all jobs will necessarily be executed.

If the checkbox box "Select to run this uploaded file immediately (excludes any files already in the import directory)."  is not checked I would assume, that your files are processed as 13. Employee Import during ONP (Over Night Processing), depending on the ONP time zone that is set for you (described in 000092117 KBA).

At this point, Knowledge Base article 000073232 “In what order are the import files processed by Concur?” is very helpful.

Although the article mainly deals with uploading to the SFTP server, I assume that the filename logic can also be applied to manual uploads.

Here is an excerpt:

However, through testing, we found a way for files to be processed

in order. The sequence of processing starts with numbers (0-9),

upper case (A-Z) then lowercase (a-z). It is important to note that

this process is not guaranteed to work 100 % of the time and

may be used with caution as this not SAP Concur certified process.

Since I also had the problem of "overtaking" with 320 and 305 when uploading to the server, Concur support gave me the following hint:

If you would like to prioritize the 320 record to run before all the other records, you can rename the files according to the attached Knowledge Base Article, so all the files on the server would look e.g. like this:

employee_p00000000000_a_320__YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.csv.pgp
employee_p00000000000_b_305__YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.csv.pgp

Applied to your case, you could experiment with naming the upload files accordingly and integrate this logic into your own naming logic, e.g.:

employee_a_320.txt

employee_b_305.txt

Please let me know if this information was helpful.

Best regards

Christian