Approval of Projects and Project-Related Activities

If projects in your organization must be approved before they can be used to record project transactions and activities, you can easily configure approval of projects and project tasks in MYOB Advanced.

Note: The functionality of project approval is available only if the Approval Workflow feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form.

Approval of Projects

To make approval required for projects, in the Project Approval Map box on the Approval tab of the Projects Preferences (PM101000) form, you specify the approval map to be used to assign projects to employees for approval. If no value is specified in the box, approval is not required. You can create an approval map by using the Assignment and Approval Maps (EP205500) form; in the map, you can specify conditions for assigning projects to specific workgroups and particular employees for approval.

If approval of projects is configured, once a user takes a project off hold, the system assigns the project the Pending Approval status and uses the rules defined by the approval map to assign the project to a workgroup or to a particular employee (in the workgroup) for approval. If no assignment occurs, the project gets the Active status.

Once the project is assigned to a workgroup, any member of the workgroup can view the project on the Approvals (EP503000) form and approve or reject it. If the project is rejected, it gets the In Planning status.

An approved project gets the Active status and becomes visible when users process project-related transactions.

Approval of Time Activities

To control the completion of time activities related to a project, you can assign the person who will be responsible for approving these time activities. An authorized approver of time activities can view the time activities assigned for approval on the Approve Time Activities (EP507000) form. The approver can apply a filter to the list of documents on this form to find specific time activities and then approve or reject them.

A time activity is assigned the Pending Approval status if the following conditions are met:

An approver is assigned to the project task specified in this time activity.
To assign the approver to a particular project task, you specify the employee ID for the project task in the Approver box on the Summary tab of the Project Tasks (PM302000) form. (Alternatively, you can specify the employee ID of the approver in the Approver column in the row with this project task on the Tasks tab of the Projects form.)
A user has clicked the Complete button on the Activities (CR102000) form.

You can also specify an approver on the project level. To do this, you specify the employee ID of the approver in the Time Activity Approver box on the Summary tab of the Projects form. This employee will be assigned to approve time activities instead of the approver specified at the project task level. If no approver is specified at the project task level, time activities with this project task will not require any approval (including the approval by the project-level approver).

If the same person is typically assigned for approving particular projects, you can configure approvers to be assigned automatically for newly created project and project tasks, as follows:

For time activities related to projects that are created based on a particular project template. To configure this, you specify the employee ID of the approver in the Time Activity Approver box on the Summary tab of the Projects form.
For time activities related to project tasks created based on a common task (which is a typical task not associated with any particular project template). To configure this, for the common task, you specify the employee ID of the approver in the Approver box on the Summary tab of the Common Tasks (PM208030) form.
For time activities related to project tasks created based on a particular project template task. To configure this, for the project template task, you specify the employee ID of the approver in the Approver box on the Summary tab of the Project Template Tasks (PM208010) form.