CONCUR LEGACY DATA ACCESS

    SAP Concur Legacy Data Access for Audit, Tax & Legal

    Self-serve historical Concur access for finance, internal audit, external auditors, tax authorities, legal and compliance — without a live tenant. SQL/REST against queryable Parquet archive. IRS Pub 463, SOX, VAT, FCPA evidence drill-down built in.

    5
    User groups served day one
    < $50K/yr
    vs $200K–$1.5M live Concur
    < 1 sec
    Typical query latency
    immutable
    WORM-style archive integrity

    Why concur legacy data access matters after decommissioning

    The live Concur subscription is gone — but the audit, tax and legal requests keep coming. Concur legacy data access answers them without re-instating the tenant.

    SAP Concur — acquired by SAP in 2014 — accumulates expense records, receipt images, itineraries and corporate-card transactions over the operational life of the tenant. Once live T&E moves to Oracle Fusion Expenses or another platform, the data still has to answer questions — sometimes years after the last expense was filed in Concur. Auditors arrive. Tax authorities follow up on a VAT reclaim. Legal opens an FCPA review. Litigation hold lands on a specific business unit's historical spend.

    Without a structured concur legacy data access strategy, each of those requests either re-activates the old Concur subscription (expensive and unnecessary) or triggers a fire-drill IT project to spin up a one-off archive query (slow and risky). Syntra ETL's concur legacy data access platform handles all five user groups — finance, internal audit, external audit, tax authorities, legal & compliance — through a single SQL/REST interface against a hash-signed Parquet archive plus original receipt images.

    Every query is logged for SOC 2 audit; every receipt-image drill is gated by role-based access. The archive is immutable (Parquet files are write-once, KMS-encrypted), so chain-of-custody arguments hold up under DOJ scrutiny for FCPA matters and under tax-authority scrutiny for IRS Pub 463 substantiation.

    The five user groups concur legacy data access serves

    1
    Finance
    Closed-period spend analysis, prior-period accruals, executive expense disclosure prep, audit-prep saved queries.
    2
    Internal Audit
    SOX walkthroughs, policy-violation investigation, approval-chain reconstruction, control-effectiveness sampling.
    3
    External Auditors
    Big-Four and regional firm support: pre-built audit samples, evidence retrieval with signed timestamped audit log, BI-tool dashboard sharing.
    4
    Tax Authorities
    IRS Pub 463 substantiation packs, HMRC VAT recovery substantiation, EU member-state extracts, indirect via auditor-prepared evidence delivery.

    What concur legacy data access lets each user group do

    Pre-built saved queries cover the most common request patterns each group will run — and custom queries are just SQL.

    📊

    Finance — period spend

    Total reimbursable amount by fiscal period and business unit, drillable to expense report and entry. Prior-period comparatives with constant-currency option.

    🔍

    Audit — sample selection

    Statistical sample selection across spending population — top-N spenders, random samples by department, exception samples flagged by Audit Service rules historically.

    📋

    External audit — evidence retrieval

    Pre-built evidence packs ready for Big-Four delivery: expense report header, entries, allocations, approvals, audit-rule trigger evidence and resolvable receipt-image URLs.

    🌍

    Tax — substantiation pack

    IRS Pub 463 substantiation pack per employee per FY, HMRC VAT recovery substantiation per quarter per member state, signed timestamped PDF and CSV output.

    ⚖️

    Legal — FCPA review

    Government-official interaction flagged spend, gift/entertainment spend by recipient category, sensitive-vendor spend with audit-rule context, compliance-only role gating.

    📌

    Litigation hold

    Affected data tagged at hold notice, excluded from retention-policy expiry, read-access log captured for hold duration, hold lift re-enables expiry.

    Standing up concur legacy data access — five stages

    From scope to first auditor self-serve query, typically 5–7 weeks.

    1

    User-Group Scoping — Week 1

    Identify the five user groups (finance, internal audit, external audit, tax authorities, legal & compliance) and the request patterns each will run. Map to role-based access scope. Define SOC 2 audit logging requirements.

    2

    Archive Build (if not done) — Weeks 1–4

    If decommissioning didn't already produce a Syntra archive, Concur REST extractors pull every in-scope expense report, receipt image, itinerary, card transaction and Invoice record. Stage as Parquet partitioned by fiscal year. Multi-TB receipt-image archive streamed in parallel.

    3

    Query Layer & Pre-built Saved Queries — Weeks 2–5

    SQL endpoint (JDBC/ODBC) and REST API provisioned. Pre-built saved queries materialized for each user group's common request pattern. Receipt-image drill-down configured with role-based gating.

    4

    BI Tool & Evidence Pack Integration — Weeks 4–6

    User-group BI tools (Tableau, Power BI, Alteryx, ACL, IDEA) connected with service-account credentials and row-level security. Evidence-pack templates configured for tax-authority and external-audit delivery.

    5

    Training & Cutover — Weeks 5–7

    User-group walkthroughs (one per group, 60–90 minutes). Auditor familiarisation sessions. Live concur legacy data access operational; new historical requests route to the archive rather than re-activating the Concur tenant.

    Why concur legacy data access wins over alternative approaches

    Six concrete advantages over keeping the Concur tenant alive or running point-in-time extracts for each request.

    💸

    100% subscription savings

    Concur per-active-user subscription cancelled in full. Mid-large customers save $200K–$1.5M annually. Concur legacy data access typically runs under $50K/year.

    Sub-second auditor queries

    Pre-materialized saved queries return in sub-second. Receipt-image drill-down resolves in under 100ms. Materially faster than Concur Cognos for the typical historical workload.

    🛠️

    Existing audit tooling

    Standard SQL works with ACL, IDEA, Tableau, Power BI, Alteryx, Looker. Auditors keep their existing workflow — no Cognos report-developer dependency.

    📜

    Immutable WORM archive

    Parquet files write-once, hash-signed, KMS-encrypted. Chain-of-custody arguments hold up under DOJ and tax-authority scrutiny.

    🔐

    Role-based access

    Finance, audit, tax, legal and HR get separately scoped roles. FCPA-flagged data gated behind compliance-only access. Sensitive-content tagging supported per receipt.

    📊

    SOC 2 audit logging

    Every query, every receipt-image fetch, every drill-down logged with user, timestamp, scope and result. Logs ship to SIEM via syslog or CloudTrail.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is concur legacy data access and who needs it?+

    Concur legacy data access is the ability for finance, internal audit, tax authorities (IRS, HMRC, EU revenue services), regulators and legal teams to query historical SAP Concur expense records — expense reports, receipt images, itineraries, corporate-card transactions and Invoice records — after the live Concur tenant has been retired or moved to read-only. Five user groups need it most: (1) Finance teams running closed-period spend analysis and prior-period accruals; (2) Internal Audit performing SOX walkthroughs and policy-violation investigation; (3) External auditors (Big-Four, regional firms) running annual audit substantiation; (4) Tax authorities responding to IRS Pub 463 substantiation requests, HMRC VAT recovery audits and EU member-state tax inquiries; (5) Legal & Compliance for FCPA review, ABAC anti-bribery investigation and litigation hold response.

    How is concur legacy data access different from a read-only Concur tenant?+

    A read-only Concur tenant still costs the full per-user subscription, still requires Concur admin staff, still consumes integration maintenance, and is still constrained by Concur's UI and Cognos report layer. SAP Concur — acquired by SAP in 2014 — uses per-active-user pricing that punishes any tenant kept alive solely for historical access. Syntra ETL's concur legacy data access provides the same data and the same drill-down capability through a SQL/REST archive at a fraction of the cost, with no Concur subscription, no admin overhead and no Cognos report-developer dependency. Auditors actually prefer it because the SQL interface integrates with their existing audit tooling (ACL, IDEA, Tableau, Power BI) without translation.

    Does concur legacy data access include receipt-image drill-down?+

    Yes. Receipt-image drill-down is non-negotiable for IRS Pub 463 substantiation and EU/UK VAT recovery — auditors need to retrieve the original receipt image in seconds to validate a closed expense. Syntra ETL's archive preserves the Concur receipt-image-id as a stable cross-reference, so any historical query returning an expense entry includes a resolvable URL to the original receipt image (JPG/PNG/PDF) plus the OCR-extracted metadata (merchant, amount, date, line items). The image fetch is gated by role-based access and logged for SOC 2 audit, satisfying the chain-of-custody requirements that external auditors and tax authorities increasingly expect.

    How does concur legacy data access handle external auditor requests?+

    External auditors typically work through a structured request flow: scope letter, sample selection, evidence retrieval, walkthrough, follow-up. Syntra ETL's concur legacy data access supports each stage: pre-built saved queries for the common audit samples (top-spender selection, policy-violation samples, corporate-card reconciliation samples, FCPA-flagged spend); evidence retrieval via SQL drill-down to expense entry plus receipt image with signed timestamped audit log; walkthrough support via shareable dashboards in the auditor's preferred BI tool. Audit firms (Big-Four and regional) routinely process Syntra-archived Concur data with materially faster turnaround than they did against the live Concur Cognos environment.

    Can tax authorities query our Concur legacy data directly?+

    Indirectly, yes. Tax authorities (IRS, HMRC, EU revenue services) typically don't get direct production-system access — they receive auditor-prepared evidence packs. Syntra ETL's concur legacy data access makes those evidence packs trivial to produce: pre-built tax-audit saved queries (IRS Pub 463 substantiation pack, HMRC VAT recovery substantiation, EU member-state per-jurisdiction extracts) generate signed, timestamped PDFs and CSVs ready for direct delivery. The evidence pack includes drill-back URLs to the underlying receipt images and the audit-rule context, so a tax authority follow-up question is answerable in minutes rather than the weeks it would take to spin up Concur Cognos report development.

    What about FCPA and ABAC anti-bribery investigations against Concur legacy data?+

    FCPA and UK Bribery Act review is one of the most demanding use cases for concur legacy data access. The investigator needs to find expense patterns tied to government-official interactions, supplier gifts, sensitive-vendor categories and out-of-policy entertainment — often spanning years and multiple business units. Syntra ETL's archive includes pre-built FCPA review queries: government-official interaction flagged spend, gift-and-entertainment spend by recipient category, sensitive-vendor spend with audit-rule trigger evidence, executive expense detail with approver chain reconstruction. Receipt-image drill-down is gated by compliance-only role so the investigation respects need-to-know boundaries while preserving the chain-of-evidence required for downstream disclosure or DOJ filings.

    How long does concur legacy data access support — and at what cost?+

    Retention windows are configurable per data class: 7 years for IRS Pub 463 and SOX, 6+ years for EU/UK VAT, effectively indefinite for FCPA-flagged data. Cost is materially lower than maintaining live Concur: cloud object storage runs pennies-per-GB-month, the query engine is consumption-priced, and there's no per-user subscription. A typical mid-large enterprise pays under $50K/year for concur legacy data access covering 7+ years of multi-TB receipt-image history — compared to $200K–$1.5M/year for a live Concur subscription kept alive purely for historical access. The math is decisive.

    Does concur legacy data access work for litigation hold?+

    Yes. Litigation hold against historical Concur data is one of the cleaner use cases — the archive is immutable by design (Parquet files are write-once, hash-signed, with KMS-managed encryption), and the read-access log captures every query for the duration of the hold. When a litigation hold notice arrives, the affected data classes (employee, business unit, date range, vendor) are tagged and excluded from any retention-policy expiry, preserved indefinitely until the hold lifts. Receipt-image drill-down satisfies the e-discovery requirement that original substantiation be retrievable for any expense entry in the hold scope. Litigation hold lift simply re-enables the retention-policy expiry on the affected data.

    Stand up concur legacy data access for your historical Concur footprint

    30-minute discovery call. We'll walk through your user groups, archive volume and retention requirements — and quantify the annual savings vs keeping the Concur subscription alive.