Workday Financial Management and SAP Concur integration

What moves between them

The primary flow runs from SAP Concur into Workday Financial Management. Approved expense reports and invoices are read from Concur's Financial Integration documents, mapped to Workday worktags and GL accounts for cost allocation, and posted into Workday's Journal Entries. Purchase requests and approved invoices from Concur flow into Workday's purchase order and supplier invoice records. Cost center and GL account references are validated in Workday before posting. The direction is Concur to Workday; Workday supplier master data can optionally sync back to Concur vendors.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores Workday OAuth2 refresh tokens and polls Workday's Financial Management API on a cadence tuned to your expense and invoice approval cycles, typically every 30 to 60 minutes. On the SAP Concur side, it calls the OAuth2 token endpoint with your company credentials and receives the datacenter geolocation in the token response; all subsequent API calls route to the correct regional endpoint (US, EMEA, or China). When reading expense or invoice approvals from Concur, ml-connector maps each cost allocation back to the Workday GL account and worktag pair that represents the same cost center, department, or project. Journal entries are posted in batch to Workday's SOAP interface. Both OAuth2 tokens are refreshed before expiry to prevent outages, and ml-connector retries on rate-limit responses. Every record carries a full audit trail so failed submissions can be replayed.

A real-world example

A mid-sized consulting firm runs Workday Financial Management for accounts payable, procurement, and cost allocation across 12 offices globally. Employees use SAP Concur to submit expense reports and travel requests. Before the integration, the finance team exported approved expenses from Concur weekly and manually re-entered line items into Workday's general ledger, allocating costs to the correct project worktags and office GL accounts. Month-end close required chasing unmatched expenses and correcting cost allocations. With Workday and SAP Concur connected, approved expense reports flow into Workday automatically and are cost-allocated to the correct office and project without re-keying, cutting month-end close time in half and eliminating manual entry errors.

What you can do

• •Post approved SAP Concur expense reports and invoices into Workday Financial Management's general ledger, allocated to the correct worktags and GL accounts.
• •Map SAP Concur cost centers and departments to Workday GL dimensions so expenses land on valid accounts and projects.
• •Authenticate both Workday and SAP Concur via OAuth2 and handle geolocation routing to the correct Concur datacenter.
• •Poll Workday Financial Management on a cadence tuned to your approval cycle, with retries and full audit trail on every journal entry.
• •Keep Workday supplier master data optionally synchronized with SAP Concur vendors for matching vendor records across systems.

Questions

Which direction does data move between Workday Financial Management and SAP Concur?

The main flow is SAP Concur into Workday Financial Management. Approved expense reports and invoices from Concur are posted into Workday's general ledger and allocated to the matching GL accounts and worktags. Optionally, Workday supplier master data can sync back to Concur vendors to keep vendor records consistent across both systems. Workday cost allocations drive Concur's financial integration configuration.

How does ml-connector handle SAP Concur's multi-datacenter geolocation and Workday's polling requirement?

ml-connector exchanges your SAP Concur credentials for an OAuth2 token and reads the geolocation (US, EMEA, or China) from the token response, then routes all subsequent API calls to the correct regional endpoint. For Workday, which has no native webhooks, ml-connector polls the Financial Management API on a schedule tuned to your expense approval cycle, typically every 30 to 60 minutes, using date-range filters to capture only new records since the last poll.

What happens if OAuth2 tokens expire or API calls fail?

ml-connector refreshes both Workday and SAP Concur OAuth2 tokens before expiry to prevent authentication failures. If a journal entry post to Workday fails, the record is retried on the next poll cycle, and the full audit trail allows manual replay of failed transactions. Rate-limit responses from either system trigger exponential backoff and retry, protecting both systems from overload.