Design Your Financial Approval Workflow

Role: Admin

Configure a financial approval workflow through the creation of Approvers and Workflow settings in the Master Administrator panel.

Workflows allow organizations to create a global approach to requisition approval; selecting a single approver based on Requisition amount and Approver Limit or setting a series of approval escalations based on dollar amount. 

Create Approvers

1. Create any approvers you wish to utilize in the workflow. Navigate to Master Data drop-down → Users on the navigation panel.  
2. Select or add a ‘User.’  Within each Approver’s user record, under ‘Approval Settings’ designate the ‘Approval Limit’ for each approver and select ‘Next Approver.’
   • When first creating your approval chain, it’s best to start backwards; creating or updating your top approver (person with the highest Approval Limit) and then move backwards to the next highest and so on. This approach allows for easy retrieval of ‘Next Approver’ because the Approver is already in the system.

Staircase Workflow: 

Admin: Create an upward review of a requisition ensuring individuals in different departments or levels of responsibility can sign off on spend. The number of approvers in the staircase is based on the requisition amount and ‘Approval Limit’ set for each Approver.

Example:  Staircase Approval workflow view from a submitted requisition. James’ approval limit is $500, Carol’s Approval Limit is $2,000 and Sarah’s approval limit is $5,000. The requisition submitted for approval is $2,659. 

• In this example the submitted requisition will first be sent to James to Review. If approved, it will go to the next approver; Carol Tester. 

Spend Limit Workflow

Workflow enables a 1-stop approval process based on requisition amount. The system will automatically bypass any approvers set with a lower approval threshold and send the requisition to the approvers whose threshold limit is not exceeded by the requisition amount. 

Example:  Spend Limit Approval workflow view from a submitted requisition. 

• In the example, Carol Tester’s account designates Sarah Burns as the next approver for requisitions beyond $2,000. Using a Spend Limit Workflow, the requisition for $2,659.00 will go directly to Sarah. 
• Sarah’s requisition approval limit is $5,000 which stops the requisition from needing to go to the next approver. It will start and stop with her. 

Fallback Approver

Regardless of if/how ‘Out Of Office’ functionality is enabled, all organizations will have the option to set a Fallback Approver from the list of users with Approver credentials. 

A designated Fallback Approver will catch any requisitions that have bypassed approval within any workflows.