Payment Demand Status - Declined - Due to Emojis :-)

[jstrong123]

Wondering if anyone else has had a similar issue...

We've had several reports stuck in a payment loop since May. The Payment Demand Status was going from Accepted to Declined on a daily basis. Since there was technically no Financial Posting failures, we didn't see these until something else came up and we found a slew of reports stuck. This has happened on other occasions as well.

We have fixed the reports. Our integration team determined the root cause is stemming from Concur allowing emojis! We are currently working to see what we can do to prevent this. But essentially if a user puts an emoji somehow into the expense report, it prevents successful financial posting causing an infinite loop.

Anyone else have anything like this happen?

[KevinD · Accepted solution]

@jstrong123 what fields are emojis appearing in? You can build an audit rule that will prevent certain characters from being used. Are the emojis showing as an emoji or are they showing just as characters. For example, if I type a colon, dash, closed parenthesis, I would get a smiley face in some applications. So, is the smiley face appearing or is it just the actual characters?

In a custom audit rule, you would need to create a rule for each field that is a text entry field. Then you would need to create one condition for each special character you want to block. The nice thing is, you can create your first rule, then copy it and simply change the field. So, if you have 10 text entry fields where special characters are being entered and you have 10 special characters you wish to block, your rule would have have the first condition as the field to look at (i.e. Business Purpose), Contains, then enter the special character. Then add a new condition using the OR operator and repeat the condition but change the special character. Keep doing that until all special characters are accounted for. Once done, you can then copy the entire rule, edit the field in each of the conditions. 

I recommend doing one rule with one condition and testing it using a test user group if you have one. See screenshot below for example. This will block entries with either > or < in the Business Purpose field. 

Also, you can do a field validation using what we call Regular Expressions. You would need access to the Forms and Fields screen, but this requires you to have taken our advanced configuration class. You can submit a help ticket to Concur Support to have them do it. You would need to provide all the fields involved and all the characters you would like blocked. The audit rule I mentioned work as well, but you can create audit rules without the need of Concur Support. 

Depends on which route you would like to take.