SAP Concur Payroll Integration

I am a Technical Consultant at SAP Concur. I have been working at SAP for many years in different roles and with different technologies. In this blog I will pick up from the blog posts from my colleague Tim Chapman and take you one step further and explain the Payroll Integration via web services from Concur into your Financial System.

Prerequisites

Please make sure that you are familiar with the web service authentication and the Financial Posting of Expense claims via web services.

You can find Tim’s authentication web services blog here: https://blogs.sap.com/2023/01/23/introduction-to-web-services-for-concur-expense-authentication/

You can find Tim’s blog for the financial posting via web services here: https://blogs.sap.com/2023/02/10/sap-concurs-financial-integration-service-explained./

Introduction

SAP Concur Financial Integration Service (FIS) can create payroll documents that can be used by your payroll system to reimburse expenses to an employee. In the previous blog posts Tim explained how web services authentication works and how to post expense claims via FIS.

For SAP Concur FIS to create a payroll document the following is required:

• The Financial Integration is enabled on the group level in Concur
• The Payroll Integration flag needs to be enabled on the group the user belongs to. Please see “6.1.3 Enabling the Integration” in this document: https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Integration/Exp_SG_Concur_SAP_Payroll.pdf
• Configure the Payroll Integration e.g. the wage types in the SAP Concur system. Please see “6.1.4 Configuring the Payroll Settings” in this document: https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Integration/Exp_SG_Concur_SAP_Payroll.pdf
• Tim has created a Postman collection that can also be used for the Payroll integration: https://github.com/SAP-samples/concur-web-services-financial-integration-service

As with the FIS Financial posting, FIS Payroll needs several API calls to complete the Feedback Loop

1. Get FIS Payroll documents
2. Acknowledge FIS Payroll documents
3. Confirm each FIS Payroll as processed by the payroll system
4. Optional – Post FIS Payment Confirmation for the Financial Posting. Usually in a Payroll environment not needed

Detailed Walkthrough

In SAP Concur a payroll document is only created after the corresponding Expense document has been confirmed as posted successfully.

The payroll document contains information such as the wage type, which is useful for posting into a payroll system.
To create a payroll document you need to first execute all the steps in Tim’s post https://blogs.sap.com/2023/02/10/sap-concurs-financial-integration-service-explained./ except the step “Mark each Financial Transaction paid (optional but recommended for expense reports)”. This is because the employee reimbursement via the payroll system has not occurred yet.

Make sure that there is at least one Expense Report that has the status “Sent for Payment”, otherwise the following API calls will not retrieve any documents.
Now open the Postman collection and change the variable doctype from expense to payroll. From now on until the variable is changed again all Get and Post calls will use the doctype payroll.

Step 1 – Get Payroll Documents

We query SAP Concur for a list of payroll documents with the:
GET /financialintegration/fi/……/transaction API (reference 1 – Get FIS Transactions – in the postman collection). In return we get a JSON that includes all the open payroll documents. Each payroll document has an ID. Please note that this ID is different than the financial document (Expense Report) it was derived from.

Get Payroll documents

Step 2 – Acknowledge each Payroll document

To tell the Concur system that we have received the Payroll documents we need to send an acknowledgement. To acknowledge the Payroll documents we use:
POST /financialintegration/fi/…/acknowledgements API (reference 3 – Post FIS Acknowledgements in the collection.
The acknowledgement must be sent as soon as you are sure that the transactions have been received successfully. You must not query for new Payroll documents without acknowledging the ones already received, failure to do so might result in duplicate results. On the other hand, if you have not received the Payroll documents successfully, e.g. transmission issues or corrupted files, then don’t acknowledge them.

Step 3 – Confirm each Payroll document posted success

Using the POST /financialintegration/fi/…/postingconfirmations API (reference 6x – Post FIS Confirmations in the postman collection), you can send back a success. This will update the audit trail.
Only send a Posting Failure if the Payroll document actually failed to post. In this case you can correct the issue and then retry the Payroll Transfer from the Concur Payroll Integration’s Posting Failures tab.

Posting confirmation

Step 4 OPTIONAL – Mark each Financial Transaction (Expense claim) paid

In a scenario where a payroll system is used users typically get paid at regular intervals. This is different to a vendor reimbursement were the users often get paid as soon as the expense claim is posted into the financial system. If there is an issue with the payment in a payroll system a user would typically check the payroll system rather than Concur. Therefore Payroll documents in Concur do not have a payment confirmation status. It is possible for the Audit Trail of the Financial Document to be updated. For this please refer to Tim’s post https://blogs.sap.com/2023/02/10/sap-concurs-financial-integration-service-explained./ and execute the step “Mark each Financial Transaction paid (optional but recommended for expense reports)”.

Mark Financial document paid

Conclusion

Payroll is a very useful part of Concur’s Financial Integration, it provides enhanced information for payroll systems e.g. the wage type.