Understanding Approval Workflow

This topic discusses:

The approval framework is responsible for sending notifications based on the definitions set up on the Approval Transaction Registry page.

See Delivered Workflows for PeopleSoft Expenses for a list of notifications.

Notification Composer Framework

Oracle PeopleSoft delivers Notification Composer Framework in Enterprise Components to manage the setup and administration of notifications in one central location. Once you have adopted the Notification Composer feature, you must use it to create new notifications and manage your existing notifications.

These PeopleSoft Expenses business processes, which are delivered with FSCM Update Image 49, must use Notification Composer:

  • Expense Report Approval

  • Expense Report Post Audit Approval

  • Cash Advance Approval

  • Cash Advance Post Audit Approval

  • Travel Authorization Approval

  • Time Report Approval

  • Time Adjustment Approval

For more information about Notification Composer Framework, see Understanding Notification Composer.

The Reassign Work feature enables administrators to move approval transactions from one approver's queue to another. This can be necessary if an approver is on leave, but has not defined an alternate approver in his or her absence. This feature can be used to reroute a transaction that was sent to the wrong approver.

  • Reassignment can be done only for the transaction that is pending approval or held in the approver's queue.

  • When reassigning a transaction to an approver who has already approved the transaction, the system automatically approves the transaction.

  • When reassigning a transaction to an approver who is already one of the regular approvers for the transaction, the transaction appears only once for that approver.

You can reroute transactions to a different approver if you use the rerouting feature in the approval configuration.

Rerouting is also referred to as escalation. A professional services organization can set escalation to occur if an approver has not performed his or her approval for a transaction within the duration specified in the transaction definition. For example, if a duration of one day is set for a project manager for time reports and a specific time report has been in the project manager's queue for a day with no action taken, the system routes the transaction to the approver designated in the transaction definition. The escalation process must be enabled and running for this to properly occur.