Approval Hierarchies Single Dialogs Workspace

Use this workspace to set up approval hierarchies for objects for approval such as expense sheets, general journals, purchase orders, vendor invoices, and other entries, including the employees or employee positions who are responsible for approvals, the order in which they must perform approvals, and any substitute approvers who can step in if an approver is unavailable.

You can set up separate hierarchies for purchase orders, expense sheets, vendor invoices, and other entry types.

See "Introduction to Approval Hierarchies" for a more detailed description of the creation and use of approval hierarchies.

In the Approval Hierarchies tab of this workspace, you enter general information about the current approval hierarchy, for example, whether approval through the hierarchy must be performed in a certain order, or if the persons who are to approve an object for approval through the hierarchy can approve the entry in an arbitrary order. You can also specify a "Super Approver" who can perform all of the approvals through this hierarchy. This ensures that the approval procedure is never blocked.

In the Approvers sub-tab, you can list the persons (or personal functions) who must approve the purchase orders, expense sheets, or vendor invoices when using this approval hierarchy. These are persons who are responsible for approval of the purchase orders, expense sheets, or vendor invoices, and other types of entries that meet a number of specific criteria. This person can be either a specific employee, employees of a given type, or a reference to an employee, such as the project manager of a job to which a given expense sheet is assigned. In addition, you can also specify a substitute who can approve the vendor invoice, expense sheet, or purchase order instead of the holder of approval.

You define the conditions that determine which person or personal function must approve a given object for approval using selection criterion specifications that you create in the Selection Criterion Specification workspace. A purchase order, an expense sheet, a vendor invoice, or other types of entries that match the selection criterion specification on a line must be approved by the person who is identified on the line in question (or by a specified substitute, if any). Because an expense sheet can fall within more than one selection criterion specification in the same approval hierarchy, it must be approved by all respective persons before it can be fully approved.

If you want objects for approval that are approved through a specific hierarchy to be approved in a certain order, you must select the Level Prioritized field in the Approval Hierarchies tab for that hierarchy. After you select this field, you can enter a level number on each line in the Approvers sub-tab and define the order in which certain persons are to approve the individual vendor invoices, expense sheets, or purchase orders.