Expense Claim Approval

After an expense claim has been submitted for further processing, it may be assigned to an authorized employee for approval. (A claim cannot be submitted if it includes any receipt with the On Hold, Pending Approval, or Rejected status, so you need to be sure no receipts have these statuses before submitting the claim.)

Note: The functionality of expense claims is available only if the Expense Management feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form.
Note: If the Approval Workflow feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features form, the system allows you to configure the approval of both expense receipts and expense claims; however, the requirement to approve the same expenses twice may involve too much redundancy in effort. For effective processing of expenses, it may be sufficient to configure the approval of only one type of expense document. For example, if you want all expenses related to a particular project to be approved by the project manager, you can configure approval of only expense receipts associated with the project.

Assignment for Approval

The system performs assignment for approval automatically in one of the following ways:

  • If the Approval Workflow feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form, the system uses approval maps, which can be created on the Assignment and Approval Maps (EP205500) form. You can specify the map for claim approval on the Time and Expenses Preferences (EP101000) form. However, if no approval map is specified or if a claim does not meet the conditions of the specified map, then the claim requires no approval—it is assigned the Open status, and it can be released immediately after submission.
  • If the Approval Workflow feature is disabled, the system assigns an expense claim for approval to the employee specified in the Reports to box on the General Info tab of the Employees (EP203000) form for the employee who is claiming the expenses; if the Reports to box is empty, the claim requires no approval—it is assigned the Open status, and it can be released immediately after submission.

Once the expense claim is assigned for approval, its status changes to Pending Approval. The claim will not be reassigned to another approver if you enable or disable the Approval Workflow feature or if you modify the approval map specified for expense claims.

Approval or Rejection of Expense Claims

You can approve an individual expense claim you are viewing by using the Expense Claim (EP301000) form. The Approve or Reject command can be applied to a claim assigned to you or to a member of a workgroup at a lower level in the company tree than your workgroup.

Also, claims can be approved on the Approvals (EP503010) form, which is available only if the Approval Workflow feature is enabled. If you have access to this form, you can view claims in accordance with the visibility rules applied to all documents listed on this form (that is, you can view the claims assigned to you, to the members of your workgroup, and to the members of the workgroups at lower levels in the company tree than your workgroup). You can approve all listed documents at once by clicking Approve All on the form toolbar, or you can approve only particular document by selecting them and then clicking Approve.

Note: Although you can use the Approvals form to approve expense claims assigned to other members of your workgroup, you cannot view the details of these claims on the Expense Claims form because of restrictions of user access. For more information about user access to expense claims, see Expense Claims.

Once a claim is approved, it can be released.

If your system is configured for the approval of expense claims and AP bills, when the system generates bills on release of expense claims, it does not assign these bills for approval as it considers these bills to be approved because the expense claims for which these bills were generated have already been approved.