SAP Concur’s Financial Integration Service explained.

[TChapman]

Cross posting an article I wrote about how to get started using Financial Integration Service APIs.

In this post, I explain how to use “Financial Integration Service” (FIS) to provide near real time bi-directional integration between SAP Concur and your systems.  By providing feedback, it allows you to leverage Concur Expense for storing and reprocessing expense reports which reduces maintenance costs.

https://blogs.sap.com/2023/02/10/sap-concurs-financial-integration-service-explained./

[bhargreaves]

Tim - sorry to go back on a fairly old post.  I read your refrenced post and found it interesting.   I have a very specific need to be able to "extract" PCard transactions for a period of time that should match-up to what the card provider is going to bill me (this is a card that the company is responsible to pay the full balanced each month).  I do pay for the additional services of a report developer - should that person be able to give me the information needed to "deliver" a report via the SFTP process?  We are opening a ticket to start the conversation, just wanted to get your thoughts.   

[leedau]

@bhargreaves Thanks for posting in the SAP Concur Community. Do  you use Company Billed Statements? You can definitely build a custom Cognos Report or request the build of a custom extract file. Let me know if you have further questions. 

Remember to tag me if you respond or feel free to mark this post as Solved if you don't have further questions or comments. To tag me on your response, you click the Reply button, first thing to type is @. This should bring up the username of the person you are replying to.

[bhargreaves]

@leedau Thank you for your response.  Yes, we are Company Bill/Company Pay.  We tried to go down the "custom extract" route and maybe it is terminology, but we got hung up on the fact that SAP could not customoize the SAE file (and said they could not create me a similar one), as that is only submitted and approved items.  While we try really hard, there always seem to be a couple users that do not get their reports approved in time for us to make the payment.  So customizing the SAE file to include all transactions that should be on the statement did not work.  We do have a report developed that does represent all transactions and ties to our statements.  We are now working with our report developer on how we can get that scheduled and sent to a SFTP site to be picked up.  Thank you and @TChapman for the guidance !

[qinwei]

Hi Tim,

Thank you for this very interesting article about FIS.

I developed a completely automated custom application to call Concur extract job via API,  extract SAE on SFTP and transfer SAE file to our Oracle ERP to generate invoices and journals 5 years ago, it has been running daily with few issues. I am thinking to upgrade our file-based SAE to FIS based integration, your article is a great help to understand the steps involved in details.  From your post and FIS API document, you all mention that "using FIS APIs, you request to receive all transactions waiting to be processed into your ERP, etc..", my initial question is whether it is possible to retrieve transactions that have been processed in Concur using FIS APIs? meaning to retrieve old and processed expense reports via FIS API calls? and how in terms of API calls details.   I know my question sounds odd as why I want to go back to the old expense transactions,  but sometimes we do need to look at the old expense transactions for verifications.

[TChapman]

Glad you liked the article!  I like your inventiveness on handling the SAE via APIs.  Its a good way to control it better then scheduling it via Concur.  As for FIS, there is a flag in the Group profile that tells Concur to send data via SAE or via FIS.  It is effective on new report creation and does not touch reports in process.  Most customers will either continue to process both until the SAE is empty, or they create some form of an audit rule that blocks old expense reports from being submitted if they aren't FIS.

As for "old and processed expense reports", I would look at the /expense/v4 APIs.  You might need to use the v3 APIs as well as there is not parity (yet) between v4 and v3.  Upgrades to v4 are on the roadmap for this year.  

Hope this helps!