The Approval Process begins as soon as an employee (or other person) "submits" a transaction. Approvals may be done in Professional or Self Service, by managers and/or administrators. Supervisors who log into the Manager Self-Service module can view and approve transactions initiated by their employees. Administrators who log into Professional or Self Service can view and approve transactions initiated by the employees they are authorized for.
Defining Approval Processes#
The Approval Process definitions identify which transactions require approval, the authorized approvers and the levels of approval required.- Approval Processes are user defined on the IDAP form.
- Approvers must be defined and associated to an approval process.
- Designated Approvers are an approver's alternate approver and are defined in IEDA and IEMDA.
- Where Clauses for Approvers & Approval Processes may be defined in IMDAO or IMWC to filter approval processes or approvers for specific functions.
Approval Functionality#
- Approval User Interfaces - Approvals may be made using two different types of interfaces. The most common interface is the approval bar and the second is the approval action button.
- Approval Bar
- The approval bar is a graphical representation with added features to see the state of the approval process.
- For more information on the approval bar please read the Approval Bar page.
- Approval Action Button
- The approval action button simply makes an approval with available optional comments.
- The Approval Bar and Approval Action Button Functions page provides a list of the functions with either an approval bar or approval action button.
- Approval Bar
- Approver Options
- Approvals on Positions
- Approval Records
- Approval Stages
- Empty Approvers
- Generic Approvals
- List of Approval Screens
- Approval Administrator
Improvements to Approvals #
The approval functionality has recently undergone some improvements to make it more user friendly and compact. These changes will be included in the 4.07.00 and above releases of Personality; they will not be included in the back ports. The new approval bar is only supported in Internet Explorer 7 and in Firefox, it is not supported in prior versions of IE. Some of the recent changes are:Some of the recent changes are:
- New approval bars in both Professional and Self Service interfaces
- Redesigned to be more compact
- Added a new approval information dialog
- Added ability to quickly approve via a single click of a mouse
- A pop up menu for approval actions is displayed when right mouse click on the approval bar
- Added ability to display a list of previous comments made for each approval step
- Context information of the record will show in place of the approval bar when an approval entity is not within the approval process
- Changes were made to the Options available for an Approver
- New option to allow or disallow the ability to decline
- New option to allow or disallow the ability to send back an approval
- Processing PA's in WVDAR/WVDARH
New changes with the 4.09.00 release include the following:
- New abilities to update outstanding approval records for approval processes
- A new Maintain Approval Records button has been added to IDAP. This button allows the user to update any outstanding approval records with any changes that may have been made to the approval process. If the approval process has been changed in any way this button should be pressed.
- A new function called UDAP has been created to update outstanding approval records. This function has the same logic as the Maintain Approval Records button in IDAP, it is just in a report update format. The UDAP should be scheduled to run every day (preferably early in the morning i.e between midnight and 7am) to ensure that any changes made to approval processes and designated approvers will be picked up and applied to any outstanding approval records.
- Start and End dates are now properly respected. A Process may have a “Start” and “End’ date where it will be considered to be “effective”. If the current approval entity’s AS_OF_DATE falls either between dates if both given, after the start if the end date is not provided or before the end date if the start date is not provided.
- A new Approval Status has been added called Future Approval. There are 2 types of Future Approvals.
- One is for records in a stage ‘Waiting Approval’, where the record has already entered an approval process and whose approver does not have UpTo approval.
- The second type is to indicate any items (ie: PAs or TS) that ‘may’ enter an approval process, such as new unsubmitted time sheets or pending PAs. This type of Future Approval is optional and is controlled by the site preference APPROVAL_WIP_REC(System_Preference) defined in IMST. Each table where approvers may need to see what they ‘may’ have to approve in the near future may be defined. For example a client may define PTS and SPA as preference values.
