Need help in understanding the Expense API V4 usage

[yvathumilli]

HI All,

I am currently exploring the Expense V4 API to retrieve all the details of a particular Expense report and present it to my end users in a different format. I logged in to our test tenant and was able to create client credentials, company token to be able to test these APIs. However I have 2 questions for which I was unable to find answers myself over the documentation and other sources:
1. I know that the depreceated V2 API used to give all the data relevant for an expense report in one go with just one API call. But now in V4 we need to call a bunch of endpoints just to gather information for one single expense report. I am currently working on a tool which has to query all the open expense reports and gather all its relevant information periodically. This now leads to too many API calls for each expense reports. Can anyone suggest a better/alternate approach if any ?
2. In the Expense V4 API I keep seeing endpoints for same information e.g., allocations, attendees... always in 2 flavors, one with specifying a user id and context type and another without that. However I am unable to get the latter one working. This is forcing me to always retrieve the User ID in order to call any of these Expense APIs. Can anyone give me a hint to what I am missing here and how I can make use of the APIs without the user id and context type? Does this require a special user with specific permissions to create the client id, secret, company token to make it work??

Sorry for the lengthy post. Highly appreciate any piece of relevant information. 

Thanks in advance.

[KevinD]

@yvathumilli hello there. If you are a site admin at your company, I would recommend you request to join the Admin Group here on the Community and post your question there. The reason being, the product forums here on Community are more trafficked by end users and not those who would deal with APIs. You are less likely to get a response to your question in this forum.

However, the Admin Group members are all site admins and those who are more likely to have worked with APIs. They are much more suited to get you a response.

[Mass]

Hi @yvathumilli 

We found the same issue from Expense v1 to Expense v4, way too many calls.

Also, Expense v4 doesn't hold the VAT breakdown we need which was available in v1.

We heard about FISAPI v4 which looked good but doesn't hold any mileage data!

We are now exploring a combination of Expense v4 to grab most of the data and then a call to FIS API v4 to retrieve the VAT data.

Thanks
Mass

[BPerry]

@Mass : Per the March 2025 release notes in the dev center, Expense v4 will soon support a Retrieve Expense Taxes by Expense ID endpoint.

[jpotts]

I wondered if you came up with a different solution for retrieving data. We're testing APIs in our Sandbox instance and noticing a lot of fields aren't available in the current APIs.

[BPerry]

@jpotts : What specific field(s) are you interested in having supported in the v4 APIs?  The SAP Concur roadmap has added multiple action items related to establishing greater parity with the legacy Connect API functionality.  Based on feedback, we can look to ensure attention is paid to elements-of-interest for consideration during the planned v4 API enhancements.

[jpotts]

Hi @BPerry  thanks for the response. I appreciate you linking the API roadmap. We're specifically looking for the account code field which Concur Support advised is not available unless the expense entry was allocated which is rare for our organization. The account code is our General Ledger expense account and a minimum requirement for most of the reporting and dashboards we planned to create after syncing Concur raw data.

[BPerry]

I'm a bit confused at the response.  An account code association with an expense is one of the key elements of an allocation.  See the ReportAllocationResponse schema. 

Are you trying to get an account code WITHOUT having an allocation, are you failing to get an account code DESPITE having an allocation, or are you interested in something else?

[jpotts]

Yes, I am looking for account code WITHOUT having an allocation:

"We're specifically looking for the account code field which Concur Support advised is not available unless the expense entry was allocated which is rare for our organization."

I'm using the field name "account code" because that's how it appears in the UI when we map it in Accounting Administration. 

[BPerry]

As to the broader question of the change in API request/response design, this was a deliberate architectural change made during the initial creation of the Spend v4 API suite.  It is understood that this may result in higher numbers of calls, particularly in the reports/expenses domain.  However, our research has shown that the more granular approach has an overall net-positive performance impact across our entire processing profile.  One issue with the "full detail" approach is that it often leads to retrieval of data that may not be relevant to the caller's use case but still requires processing to generate the response payload.  For example, using the "full detail" API to get all of the main expense details for a report but without any need of itemization, allocation, or attendee detail.  The v4 approach allows consumers to target precisely the desired data with the most-balanced performance impact.