Starting the Approval Process
A Service Administrator manages the approval process, including setting up approval unit hierarchies, assigning the approval unit hierarchy to a specific Scenario, Year and Period, and setting up validation rules.
See Creating Approval Unit Hierarchies.
During the approval process, an Administrator or Power User can monitor the status of each entity within the approval unit hierarchy and perform approval actions for these entities. Other users perform approval actions from the Approvals card on the Home page. See "Reviewing and Approving Data" in Working with Financial Consolidation and Close.
After the Approval Unit Hierarchy is defined and assigned to a specific Scenario, Year and Period, a Service Administrator or Power User can start the review process.
In the Manage Approval screen, the system displays all entities for which the Power User has either Read or Write access. If a Power User has only Read access to an entity, they cannot Start or Exclude that entity. If the Power User has Write access to an entity, they can Start and Exclude the entity. If the Power User has None access to the entity, the entity will not be displayed in the listing.
Note that if a Power User has Write access to a Parent entity, and selects to Start the approval process from the Parent entity, all of the children of that Parent entity will also be started, which may include entities with Read access only or None access.
After the process is started, the approval unit moves from one reviewer to another until the process is complete. By default, the approval status is "Not Started". The Start process changes the approval unit status to "Under Review".
When you start the approval process, the system starts the process for the entities within the Approval Unit Hierarchy. You can instead start each base entity separately.
After the Start process, the current owner for each entity is set to the first owner in the promotional path, as displayed in the "Current Owner" column. As the approval unit is promoted within the promotional path, the Current Owner and Location are updated accordingly. An Administrator or Power User can monitor the status of each entity within the Approval Unit Hierarchy and perform approval action for these entities from the Process Status screen.
The Administrator or Power User can restart the process at any time by selecting a specific entity to Exclude. The system clears all approval history for the entity, and you can select Start again to restart the review process, which moves the entity to the first owner of the promotional path.
If the application does not have Enhanced Organization by Period enabled, when you start a base entity, its parent and ancestors will also be started. If you start a Parent entity, all of its descendants will be started.
If the application has Enhanced Organization by Period enabled, when you start a base entity, the system will also consider the "Active/Inactive" status of the entity to determine if the Start or Exclude action should stop when it encounters the Inactive entity within the hierarchy. An entity is considered Inactive if it is assigned the Inactive consolidation method. Otherwise, the entity will be considered "Active".
In an Enhanced Organization by Period application, when a base entity is started in application, the system will also start its active parent or ancestors. As it proceeds up the hierarchy for the ancestors, the system will only include Active parents or ancestors. Therefore, as it enumerates upward for Active parents, it will stop when it encounters an Inactive ancestor.
When a Parent entity is started, the system will start only its Active children or descendants. When traversing the hierarchy, it stops enumeration downward when it encounters an Inactive child. The Inactive child member and its descendants will not be considered in the start process.
To start the approval process:
- Click the Navigator icon
.