FGI implemented many claims stuck in "Pending External Validation" status as disaster in Concur sys

[SurjithK]

Hi Team

We have implemented Funds and Grants in Concur.

Something significant has happened in the Concur system. Many claims are currently stuck in "Pending External Validation" status and are not appearing on the monitoring page.

This issue cannot be managed through the normal process:

1. Claims cannot be recalled.
2. Claims cannot be deleted.
3. Claims cannot be sent back to employees.
4. Claims cannot be approved.
5. Claims cannot be rejected.

Don't know how to fix? Can anyone help? 

Regards

Surjith

[KevinD]

@SurjithK I have someone looking into this. Stay tuned. 

[LucasA]

Hi Surjith,

The behavior you are seeing points to the external validation integration not completing the validation step back to Concur for these claims.

When you enable External Validation, Concur hands each submitted claim off to your external integration and holds it in "Pending External Validation" until the integration posts the result back. While a claim is in that state, it is intentionally locked, which is why it cannot be recalled, approved, rejected, sent back, or deleted through the normal UI. That matches exactly what you are describing.

Normally that round trip happens in a matter of seconds, so a large number of claims sitting in this status is not expected. It usually means the integration failed to process or respond for those claims, and they are now waiting on a result that never arrived. The claims themselves are not lost or corrupted in Concur, but they will stay locked until the integration successfully posts the validation result, at which point they release and continue through the workflow.

A few areas I would suggest checking on the integration and Concur configuration:

• Is your subscription active and pointed at the correct endpoint?
• Is your integration receiving the events for these claims?
• Is your integration parsing those events and running your validation logic without erroring out?
• Is your integration sending the final POST back to Concur, and is that call returning a success response?

The exact steps depend on whether your setup uses the newer Event Subscription Service (ESS/v4) approach or the older Callout model. The end-user experience looks the same in both, but the APIs, configuration, and the specific call your integration needs to make differ quite a bit, so confirming which one you are on is a good first step. For reference:

Callout model:

• Event Notification Callout: https://developer.concur.com/api-reference/callouts/event-notification.html
• Workflow action API: https://developer.concur.com/api-reference/expense/expense-report/post-report-workflow-action.html

ESS / v4 model:

• Event Subscription Service v4: https://developer.concur.com/api-reference/ess/v4.event-subscription.html
• Expense Report events: https://developer.concur.com/event-topics/expense/v4.expense-events.html
• Workflows v4 API: https://developer.concur.com/api-reference/expense/expense-report/v4.workflows.html

I will also send you a private message here in the community so we can work through the specifics without sharing any internal details on the public forum.