Approvals Design

Designing dimensions effectively is important to ensure accurate reporting, analysis, and performance management.

Follow these practices when designing approvals.

Build Approvals

Use approvals to track budgets and review status, planning unit ownership, and process issues. This reduces the time required for the planning cycle.

Set up the approval path independent of organizational structure to reflect the path a plan or forecast must follow for approval.

Users can provide annotations and comments for their submissions.

Set Up the Approvals Hierarchy

Setting the approvals hierarchy defines the promotional path used in approvals. The basis of the hierarchy is the Entity or any part of the Entity dimension in combination with any secondary dimension.

The secondary dimension can be a mix of several dimensions, depending on where you are in the workflow. For example, for some entities, you can combine the Entity dimension with the Products dimension in the promotional path, and for other entities you can use the Channels dimension in the promotional path.

You can directly assign the approvals unit to owners and reviewers. You can create validation rules to handle conditional promotion paths that are dependent on data conditionals. You create different hierarchies to support review processes within your organization.

The hierarchy is then assigned to the appropriate Scenario and Version combination.

Planning units are combinations of scenario, version, and entity or part of an entity. Scenarios and versions are the basis of the review cycle. The hierarchy contains approvals units and any other dimensions that are part of the review process.

Things to know about approvals:

  • The review process follows the promotional path you set up when you select the owner and reviewers for a planning unit, unless an event triggers a change in the promotional path.

  • Parent/child relationships between members affect the review process

  • When users promote or reject a parent, the parent’s children are promoted or rejected unless they are approved. The owner for the parent becomes the owner of the children.

  • When users approve a parent, its children are approved.

  • After all children are promoted to the same owner, the parent is promoted to the owner.

  • When the status of all children changes to one status, for example Signed Off, parent status changes to the same status.

  • Users can't change the status of a parent if its children have different owners.

  • If the children are promoted to, submitted to, or signed off by different users, the parent has no owner and only Service Administrators can change its status.

  • The approval unit moves from one reviewer to another until the budget process is complete.

For additional information, see Managing Approvals.

You can also include phased approvals, as described in Managing Approval Phases.