Background information
This article presents all setup configurations for your approval system, as well as all available steps in the approval workflow.
Approval process by legal entity
It is possible to define specific approval steps for each legal entity. All users associated to the legal entity will be submitted to this workflow.
The approval process can contain as many steps as you wish, which will be launched one after another:
Approval steps
Each step needs an approver. This person can either be:
- personalized according to the user the user (such as their direct manager)
- preassigned so as to submit all expense reports to this one person
When the approver cannot be found, which happens when an expense report is allocated to the project of a undefined manager or a recent leaver, you can then define a substitute approver.
In addition to this, each step can have an activation threshold. When the option is ticked, the expense report only goes through the step if its amount (in the legal entity currency) is higher than the threshold.
It is possible to define one of the step thresholds to a lower amount than the previous steps.
Naming an approver
For each step, you have several options to choose the approver from.
Each step is available in one of the two following categories: Contextual approver, User choice.
Contextual approver
The contextual approver is automatically determined by Lucca Expenses, based on the information contained in the HR file of the user submitting expenses, or, according to the specifications of the expense report.
- Manager: this is the person specified in the “manager” field.
- N+2: this is the manager's manager.
- Lucca Expenses approver: if you select this option, a new field will show up in the user file. You will then be able to choose a different approver from the manager. For the user files that do not contain any valuer in this field, Lucca Expenses will be using the manager field instead.
- Head of department: Lucca Expenses checks the department to which the user is assigned ("departement" field).
- If a Head of department has been entered, they will receive the expense report.
- If not, Lucca Expenses will get back in the organisation chart until a department manager from a superior level is found.
- If no manager has been found, the expense report will go to the following step.
- Analytical section manager: this option will be displayed if you have chosen to group expenses according to their analytical allocation. This feature can be found above the Global workflow settings section, in the Management rules module.
If the expense report is allocated to an analytical axis with a manager, this manager will be the approver.
Specific approver
You can indicate a specific user, who will approve all expense reports from the company exceeding a threshold. This is frequently used to obtain the approval of a Director or CFO for a significant reimbursement.
Substitute approvers
For each approval step, you can choose a second approver, who will be notified if the first approver has not been found. This will happen, for example, when the expense report is allocated to a cost center without a designated supervisor, when the Lucca Expenses approver has not been defined in the co-worker file, or when the head of department value is missing.
If the substitute approver does not exist, the expense report will be sent to the next step of the approval workflow, or will be definitely approved if it the missing step was the last one.
Ignoring a step depending on the expense report
If you activate this option, every expense report with an amount lower than the threshold will automatically go to the next step of the approval workflow.
This is be useful if you need to have expense reports exceeding an amount of 1,500£ being approved by the CFO, for example.
To do so, you need to name the CFO as the approver for the last step and make sure this very step is ignored if the expense report amount does not exceed 1,500£.