Define an Approval Workflow

The sales and purchase document approval system enables users to submit a document, typically a sales order or purchase order, for approval according to a predefined hierarchy of approval managers with specified approval amount limits.

The approvals setup is typically done in cooperation with the accounting manager, the sales person approver that must approve documents, or someone in a similar key role in the company. This manager or other key decision maker defines which documents are relevant to approve and how users should be placed in the approval hierarchy.

In addition to the manager responsible for defining the approval hierarchy, you need to appoint an approval administrator who maintains the approval system and who can:

• Have rights above all other users

• Add new users

• Set substitute users

• Connect new documents to approve

• View pending approvals for all users

Templates

You can use templates to select which types of sales or purchase documents to include in the approval process. A standard set of templates, for both sales and purchase documents, has been provided for this purpose.

If a particular document requires two different reviewers, you can set up additional approvers. For example, in a small company where the manager or the owner has to approve everything, he can be set as an additional approver.

Notification

The notification system sends e-mail notifications between users and their approvers about documents that need approval. In addition, overdue notifications can be sent by the administrator to be sure all approvers remember to approve their documents.

Delegating Approval

You can assign a substitute approver for times when a primary approver is out of office, so that a process does not get delayed. Since the administrator is responsible for maintaining the document approval system, it is his task to add substitute approvers and ensure that pending notifications are delegated to the substitutes.

With a few exceptions, the overall principles and workflow are the same for both sales and purchase documents.

The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them. These tasks are listed in the order in which they are generally performed.

To	See
Determine settings such as the administrator of the approval system, approval deadlines, and whether you want document rejections to be included in a comment note.	How to: Set Up the Document Approval System
Set up the users involved in the approval process.	How to: Set Up Users and Approvers
Set maximum monetary amounts that a user can approve.	How to: Set Up Amount Limits
Choose the type of document to be included in the approval process.	How to: Set Up Document Inclusions
Define which events (approval, rejection, cancellation, or delegation) should trigger an e-mail to the approvers notifying them that a document is awaiting their approval.	How to: Set Up Email Notifications
Set up an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server to send e-mail notifications.	How to: Set Up SMTP Mail Notifications
Delegate an approval task to a substitute approver.	How to: Set Up Substitute Approvers
Appoint additional approvers.	How to: Set Up Additional Approvers
Modify the template that defines the content of notification mails between users in the approval system.	How to: Modify Mail Templates for Document Approval Notifications

See Also

Tasks

Walkthrough: Approving Documents

Concepts

Work with Document Approvals