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Please join us on Monday, July 22nd from 9am – 10am Pacific where in-house experts from the SAP Concur team will provide answers to your questions regarding the self-service upgrade for Travel Allowance.
This is an interactive “Ask Me Anything” event! Meaning, during this event, you will have the opportunity to ask our experts any questions you might have regarding Travel Allowance Upgrade in our event thread below. Think of this like a mini-Fusion session where you can chat with our Travel subject-matter experts and gain keen insights simply by commenting and asking them in line (below). They will answer them on July 22nd at 9am PT.
Some items of importance:
So, get your Travel Allowance Upgrade questions ready and we will see you on July 22nd!
Upgrades of a unsupported non-statutory country for which SAP Concur does not currently provide a Concur-managed Statutory Rate Bundle (India for example), requiring the creation of a custom Client Rate Bundle, are not yet currently available. Dates for upgrading custom legacy travel allowance will be made available in the future.
When we transition to the new Travel Allowance there are a few locations that I will need to override the rate from the GSA. I am able to do this in the legacy Travel Allowance now and update the rates once annually. How can this be accomplished in the new Travel Allowance configuration?
The ability to override specific rates published by the GSA as part of the Concur US statutory rate bundle is supported through the use of the statutory bundle combined with a client rate bundle. If you are referring to the feature in legacy TA called "User Entry of Rate Location" which allows the user to override the system selected arrival rate location, this feature will not be available in the TA Service.
We support employees in countries that are currently part of the Travel Allowance Upgrade such as Germany as well as in some that aren't yet part of the Travel Allowance Upgrade such as Italy and Sweden. What is the time line for Italy and Sweden? We'd prefer to work with our EMEA Finance team once for this endeavor - as opposed to multiple times.
@raochi Upgrades for Italy and Sweden rate bundles are not yet scheduled but they are going to be available and dates will be announced in the near future.
Is it still possible to 'Combine Rate Categories' for Meals and Incidentals when using 'Daily Allowance'? I receive an error message when saving. A recommendation on the forum was to start a Configuration TA from scratch but that doesn't seem to work either.
The functionality which allows the ability to 'Combine Rate Categories' for Meals and Incidentals is limited to Actuals v Limits (reimbursable travel allowance) on the Configuration Code page. This is due to an improvement in the way fixed daily allowances now maps to separate daily allowance expense types in the Travel Allowance Service. The ability to "combine" meals and incidentals amounts can be handled manually within the configuration of a client (custom) rate bundle.
I would like the know if the upgrade will affect these extracts;
305 - Emp demografic record
350 - Travel Record
320 - New Hires
256 - Accounting file - Cash - Credit and Pcard
The upgrade will not affect the Employee Import record types (305, 320, 350), while the Travel Allowance Data section in the accounting extract (columns 212-224) will be populated with the same data from TA Service as with Legacy TA.
We follow the GSA rule of 75% meal and incidental allowance for the first and last days of travel and travel allowance can't begin or end more than 24 hours before or after the event the person is attending. With the current travel allowance system, you a user flags an extra day(s) as personal, the system doesn't deduct the 25% for any of the remaining days. For example, for a conference starting on a Monday, a user can start claiming daily allowance on Sunday. If they actually leave for the event on Saturday, and flag Saturday as a personal day, they still receive 100% of the daily allowance for Sunday, when they should only receive 75%. Is that something that can be addressed in the new system?
I just want to ensure I understand, you're referring to when a user flags their first day of an itinerary as Personal, i.e., Leave, meaning that they would receive no allowances on that day, the next day of travel would be set to 75% for meals?
Yes, that is correct.
Let me dig into this a little more and then I'll contact you via direct message.
Hi team,
Will there be a tool to convert old TA Config to the new one?
Hello @mmiller04 This is an upgrade - TA configurations must be manually set up in Travel Allowance Service either through self-service or by SAP Concur or a Service Partner.
A new question via DM:
"Our company has purchased MRA, does it mean that TA upgrades are for us then covered by this package with no additional cost?"
MRA team can be responsible for your company's TA upgrades as team of experts in the TA area but the assisted upgrade project / or configuration hour are still required. MRA covers manual rates updates, not implementations or re-implementations like in this case.
Is it possible to assign different TA Configurations per Employee Group? We have hourly and salaried employees and we don't want the salaried employees to have access to the Lodging rates.
Yes, it is possible to assign different Travel Allowance Service Configurations using the Travel Allowance Feature Hierarchy where this is linked to Employee fields connected to the Employee Group.
Will the new travel allowance pull in the GSA rates whenever there is an update - usually twice a year?