Employee Import 305 Best Practices

[MartaNapieralska]

1. Documentation.

Once you know that you’re going to work with Employee Import/HR Feed, get familiar with the records that you’re going to use. Although the Import file is quite extensive, most likely your company won’t use all the record types available. Once you know which are the record types, check the information about them in the Employee Import PDF. Each column presented in Excel has its own reference in the Employee Import document. Try to work with both simultaneously.

1. Record 100. What to remember?

• Record 100 is mandatory to include in employee imports. Without record 100 (or with an error included in 100), the SAP Concur system won’t be able to read your flat file.
• In the record 100, in column 3, the best is to put the value ‘SSO’. Even if your company doesn’t use Single Sign-On, from a security perspective, SSO is the most beneficial for SAP Concur customers. In that way, the user must use the ‘Forgot Password’ link, and the initial password will be sent to the user at his email address.

• UPDATE/REPLACE: what should we use?

In most of the scenarios, please use ‘update’ in column 4. Why?

REPLACE: Replace the existing record completely with the one in the feed.

UPDATE: Update the existing record with only those fields that are non-blank in the import file. Existing passwords for employees are never overwritten.

Scenario 1: 100,0,SSO,UPDATE,EN,N,N

The above import settings used in the ‘305' record employee import file will update existing records with only those fields that are non-blank in the import file.

Scenario 2: 100,0,SSO,REPLACE,EN,N,N

The above import settings used in the '300/305' record employee import file will replace the existing record completely with one available in feed.

It is recommended to use 'UPDATE' instead of 'REPLACE'. As 'REPLACE' wipes off the existing data in the user's profile (if non-mandatory field values are not provided in the employee import file)

1. Record 305.

• Login ID (column 6): the best is to set the email address as the login ID. SAP Concur requires the login ID to be in “@domain” format.
• Locale code (column 9): Please refer to the ‘employee_import.pdf’ guide (section 7, Appendix). Do not use ISO codes here.
• Reimbursement CRN Code (column 13): please use ISO codes here. It can be either a three-letter digit or a letter currency code for re-imbursement currency.
• Active Y/N (column 15): if you load the user for the first time, please use the value ‘Y’. Using ‘N’ might cause some issues, for example, for approver assignments. It's not possible to set a deactivation date by import, but it can work when you do it manually through the user interface.
• Custom 17 (column 38) is mostly used as SAP vendor ID.
• Employee ID of Approvers (column 59-61): Before assigning the approver to the user, remember that the approver must already exist in SAP Concur, or the approver must be included in the same file as the user. If you go for the second option, do not worry about the order; managers can be at the beginning of the file as well as at the end. SAP Concur reads the file twice and is adjusting the information.

1. Synchronization between Expense and Travel (record 305).

In many cases, SAP Concur clients want to implement Expense and Travel a module. SAP Concur can offer some options to make the synchronization of the name of the user smoother and more efficient. The two settings in SAP Concur are:

1. Employee Import Updates Name Fields: this setting defines if the Employee import will update the profile names after creation.
2. Synchronize Name Fields between Travel and Expense: this setting defines if the profile will have a single set of names and primary email address, or if this should be broken between Expense and Travel to be 2 separate sets.

1. Employee Name… is set to	2. Synchronize Name… is set to	Result
YES	YES	Best practice #1 - the most straightforward - Profile has a single set of names and email address. - Employee import (305) updates names and primary email address for existing users
NO	YES	Best practice #2 - Preventing import updates while maintaining single data points. Users in Expense searched by travel name or Employee ID. - Profile has a single set of names and email address. - Employee import (305) will NOT update names and email address for existing users.
YES	NO	- Profile now has 2 sets of names and email addresses: a main one used for Travel and a separate one for Expense. - Employee import (305) WILL update names for existing Expense, and primary email address for both Travel and Expense. Travel names remain untouched by the import. NOTE: in this scenario you may have potentially different email addresses for each service (but remember 305 overwrites them both).
NO	NO	- Profile now has 2 sets of names and email addresses: a main one used for Travel and a separate one for Expense. - Employee import (305) will NOT update names for existing users on either of the 2 sets. It WILL update the primary email address. NOTE: in this scenario you may have potentially different email addresses for each service (but remember 305 overwrites them both).

1. Record 350.

• Travel permissions – some of my customers want to provide the end user information like address, job title, but they don’t want to give Travel wizard user permission. The good information is that the setup is possible. The 350-employee import will update the user profile with the data even if the travel permission is not assigned.
• Travel Class Name (Column 18) - Travel policy definition (what the user is allowed to book), needs to be pre-defined in the TRAVEL module.

1. Massive load of HR master data.

Some SAP Concur customers are not sure how the load of users should be processed if we’re talking about thousands of end users. The best practice here is to send multiple flat files and separate them per country or region. However, you might want to consider importing any accounts with Approver = Y first, regardless of the country. This way, the cross-country approver issue is avoided.