Using SAP to process Expense Reimbursements

[Rman68]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to see if anyone has experience with using ICS to post expense reports to Vendor IDs (employee). And then using SAP to process the reimbursements.

1. Do you create Vendor IDs for each employee? Does this cause an issue with AP activities due to the additional volume in Vendor IDs (employee count can be from 5,000-10,000)

2. How do you maintain the banking information for employees?

3. How do you process the reimbursements? Through the payment runs? Does the volume cause issues?

Any other insights would be greatly appreciated. We are trying to brainstorm ideas of how this can work.

Thank you

[PamSciarra]

Hi,

We set up our process 10 years ago, before there was any link between SAP & Concur.  So I can't refer to ICS.  The way we do it is that we have a dedicated vendor range in AP (in SAP) for employee expense reimbursements.  Each employee's vendor number is the employee's employee ID number in Concur.  We use the SAE (Standard Accounting Extract) file that Concur provides nightly.  We pull the file (.txt) into our system via SFTP and then run it thorugh a "bridge program" to convert the SAE .txt file into an uploadable file into SAP.  We've also built a daily output file to identify any report keys that did not successfully load into SAP.  We can then use standard SAP payment processes to issue payments to our employees. 

The two downsides we see with doing the payments out of AP are:  1. having the employees update their banking info since this is likely separate from your payroll process (and employee's don't think about expense reimbursements if they change banks) and 2. privacy protection on employee data in SAP.

I imagine there are new and more efficient possibilities available nowadays, but I hope that helps in case you end up going a route similar to what we are doing.

[Rman68]

Hi Pam,

Great information. A couple of follow up questions.

1. Where do employees maintain their banking details?

2. How do you process credit card payments on employees behalf (i.e. employee submits credit card transaction in Concur)

Thank you!

[BEngelke]

We are currently looking to implement something similar hoping Concur could house the employee banking information and we could extract via the SAE then import to SAP so that reimbursement could run via AP. Curious on the same questions above and also 3. Does Concur have a way to notify if an employee changes banking information (so we can ensure it's flowing to SAP correctly)? 

Thank you!