- SAP Managed Tags
Budget checks and reservations for Public Sector customers are available as part of SAP Integration with Concur Solutions, a.k.a. ICS or Native Integration. A colleague of mine announced the availability of the functionality a while ago with the following blog post: Enable cost and budget control through our new integration between SAP Concur and SAP S/4 HANA. In this blog post, I want to explain what is available in the systems with focus on the budget checking/reservation aspects.
The functionality is available for S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, S/4HANA 2022 and S/4HANA 2023 in combination with Concur Professional Edition. Public Sector Management (PSM) functionality needs to be active in the Financials system.
Scenarios
For checking or reserving budgets, ICS distinguishes 3 scenarios:
- Budget checks/reservations based on a travel request (TR). The reserved budget is consumed/replaced later by the actuals posting of one or more expense reports (ERs) which reference the TR.
- Budget checks/reservations based on an ER. The reserved budget is consumed/replaced later by the actuals posting of the ER.
Note: The technical vehicle for this check is the document type expense report obligation (ERO) from Concur's Financial Integration Services (FIS) API. - Budget checks/reservations based on a TR, followed up by budget checks/reservations based on an ER which consume/replace the reservation done by the TR, followed up by the actuals posting of the ER.
Concur Configuration
ICS retrieves transactional data from Concur through the FIS API. For budget checks and reservations, 2 new document types have been made available in FIS: Travel Request and Expense Report Obligation. Whether these document types are created or not, depends on several things:
- Enablement of Funds & Grants Integration on Expense Group level in addition to the enablement of the Financial Integration itself
- Dedicated steps in the workflow of a TR and/or an ER to trigger the budget check/reservation.
You define in the workflow of a TR and/or an ER
- when an interaction with the Financials systems should take place, e.g., after submitting the TR but before approval, and,
- what type of interaction should happen, i.e. a check or a reservation.
Interaction means that a document will be put into the FIS queue and that the document needs to be processed by a consumer, e.g., ICS, for the workflow of a TR or an ER to continue.
Note: You can add several check and reservation steps to a workflow if needed.
A third type of interaction is automatically triggered although not visible in the workflow definition. Concur will request to release any reserved, but not consumed budget for a TR or an ER if the budget reservation is no longer required, e.g., if a TR is closed.
Within Concur you can also define how Concur should react on errors that are raised by the Financials system. That piece of configuration is part of the Integration Manager role and visible under Administration -> Company -> Tools. In addition, there is also a monitoring application:
Financials / ICS Configuration
Pre-requisite: PSM functionality is active in your Financials system.
If you want ICS to handle TRs and/or EROs, you need to select the corresponding option from Integration Activities within the Concur Integration Setup app:
After you have selected a Budget Integration option, a wizard will become accessible to define configuration details. The wizard is similar to the one available for the actuals posting of an ER (Financial Posting -> Create/Change Expense Report Import). In fact, some configuration settings are inherited from that configuration and can't be changed.
ICS doesn't support the replication of the PSM-specific master data objects so far. When building the integration, we've assumed that the PSM-specific objects will be derived in many cases in the Financials system, e.g., through the PSM derivation logic (transaction FMDERIVE). But if a PSM-specific master data object is entered on the TR or ER, that object can be included for budget checks/reservations and the actuals posting of an ER.
Example
Now, let's have a look at the system interactions for the following Funds & Grants scenario:
Starting point for the system interactions is the submission of a TR:
A TR document is put into the FIS queue for requesting a funds check from the Financials system:
The TR document is retrieved and processed by ICS. The result of the processing is returned to Concur. In the example, sufficient budget is available and this information is sent back to Concur. The audit trail of the TR is updated with the information. The TR workflow continues with the approval step. After the TR is approved, a budget reservation should happen. A TR document is put into the FIS queue to request the budget reservation. In the given example, a total of $300 is reserved for 2 different travel request entries. The budget consumption type is 52 (Travel Request Pre-encumbrances). In general, an own reservation is made per entry respectively allocation in case of allocation split.
Note: The previously visible funds check is removed from the display within ICS' Concur Documents as the funds check is no longer relevant.
As the funds reservation was successful, the TR is now approved and can be linked to an ER. As usual, the initial cost estimations of the TR didn't match reality. One expense of the trip is higher than expected, the other expense is lower than expected.
After submitting the ER, a document is put into the FIS queue requesting a budget reservation for the ER.
The successful budget reservation leads to several updates:
- Concur is updated with the result of the processing in Financials, i.e., the successful budget reservation. The expense report is moved to the approval step.
- A budget reservation is created for the expense report with consumption type 53 (Expense Report Obligation). Please ignore the description for the consumption type on the screenshot below.
Note: If there are expenses in the ER that aren't linked to a TR entry, then additional budget will be reserved for those expenses without consuming from the TR budget.
One more update happened: The Expense Report Obligation (ERO) consumes budget that has previously been reserved for the TR. If you look at the TR budget data, you will notice a change. How this update looks depends on PSM settings. In my set up, the TR data only shows the consumed budget. In other set ups, you might even see that the ERO required more than the initially reserved budget for one of the expenses.
After the ER is approved. The actuals posting of the ER happens. Thereby consuming the budget reservation for the ERO. As the posting was successful, the ER on Concur side is updated and moved to the next workflow step. The journal entry numbers are visible in the ER's audit trail.
The budget reservation for the ER has been consumed by the successful actuals posting. This is reflected when you look up the budget reservation for the ER.
Depending on the set up for the ER, a request to release any remaining budget reservation will be triggered after the successful posting of the ER or after the payment notification happened. As all of the budget has been consumed by the actuals posting, there's no update within PSM. Only an additional expense report obligation document will become visible in the Concur Documents monitor which is similar to what I will show below for the TR.
As the trip is now complete, the TR can be closed which leads to another update in Financials. A document of type Travel Request is put into the FIS queue requesting the release of all remaining budget reservations for the TR. In the given example, this means that a reservation of $50 needs to be released.
If you've got questions/feedback, please leave a comment.
