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Journal Approval Overview

The GL Journal Approval Process obtains the necessary management approvals for manual journal batches. The process validates the journal batch, determines if approval is required, submits the batch to approvers (if required), then notifies appropriate individuals of the approval results.

The process has a result type of GL Journal Approval Process Result that gives one of four results:

The process consists of 5 unique activities, some of which are reused, to comprise the 9 activity nodes that appear in the workflow diagram:

Customizing Journal Approval

Journal Approval can be customized to meet your organization's specific needs. We provide three customization mechanisms:

Profile options: There are two profile options that affect how Journal Approval operates:

Workflow activity settings: You can change the default settings for the:

Caution: If you decide to change these settings, be careful when selecting your new values, since the settings work together with a compounding effect. Specifically, the approver timeout is processed for each manager notification sent.

For example, if the approver timeout is 7 days and the notification resend limit is 3, a journal batch will remain in the approval cycle for 21 days if the approver does not respond.

Customizable activities: We have provided four activities and one process that you can customize:

Caution: We strongly recommend that you modify only these activities and processes when customizing the GL Journal Approval Process.

GL Journal Approval Process Activities

Following is a description of each activity listed by the activity's function name. You can create all the components for an activity in the graphical Oracle Workflow Builder except for the PL/SQL stored procedures that the function activities call. All function activities execute PL/SQL stored procedures which you must create and store in Oracle8. The naming convention for the PL/SQL stored procedures used in the GL Journal Approval process is:

GL_WF_JE_APPROVAL_PKG.<PROCEDURE>

GL_WF_JE_APPROVAL_PKG is the name of the package that groups all the procedures used by the GL Journal Approval process, except the customizable procedures. <PROCEDURE> represents the name of the procedure.

Customizable procedures are grouped together in the package named GL_WF_CUSTOMIZATION_PKG. The naming convention is the same as described for the GL Journal Approval package.

Start (Node 1)

This is a Standard function activity that simply marks the start of the process.

Function WF_STANDARD.NOOP
Result Type None

GL Initialization & Validation Process (Node 2)

This activity is a subprocess that performs initialization, then validates the journal batch. If the journal batch is valid, the subprocess also determines whether the batch requires approval. To view the subprocess, choose GL Initialization & Validation Process under the Processes branch of the Workflow Builder navigator tree. See: GL Initialization & Journal Validation Process.

Result Type GL Initialization & Validation Process Result

GL Preparer Approval Process (Node 3)

This activity is a subprocess that determines if the journal batch preparer is authorized to approve his/her own journal batch. If so, the batch is approved, the approver name is set, and notifications are sent. To view the subprocess, choose GL Preparer Approval Process under the Processes branch of the Workflow Builder navigator tree. See: GL Preparer Approval Process.

Result Type GL Preparer Approval Process Result
Prerequisite Activities GL Initialization & Validation Process

GL Approval Process (Node 4)

This activity is a subprocess that finds all necessary approvers, seeks journal batch approval, and sends notifications of approval or rejection. To view the subprocess, choose GL Approval Process under the Processes branch of the Workflow Builder navigator tree. See: GL Approval Process.

Result Type GL Approval Process Result
Prerequisite Activities GL Initialization & Validation Process, GL Preparer Approval Process

End (Nodes 5 through 9)

This function activity marks the end of the process. Although the activity itself does not have a result type, each node of this activity in the process must have a process result assigned to it. The process result is assigned in the property page of the activity node. Since the GL Journal Approval process activity has a result type of GL Journal Approval Process Result, each End activity node must have a process result matching one of the lookup codes in the GL Journal Approval Process Result lookup type.

Function WF_STANDARD.NOOP
Result Type None

See Also

Setting Up Journal Approval

GL Initialization & Validation Process

GL Preparer Approval Process

GL Approval Process


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