Starting the Approval Process

An administrator manages the approval process, including setting up approval unit hierarchies, assigning the approval unit hierarchy to a specific Scenario, Year and Period, setting up validation rules, and starting the review process.

See Creating Approval Unit Hierarchies.

During the approval process, the administrator can monitor the status of each entity within the approval unit hierarchy and perform approval actions for these entities. The Process Status is only available to the administrator. 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 you have defined an Approval Unit Hierarchy and assigned it to a specific Scenario, Year and Period, the approval process can be started. Only an Administrator can start the approval process. 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, however, 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.

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. The Administrator can monitor the status of each entity within the Approval Unit Hierarchy and perform approval action for these entities from the Process Status screen.

An Administrator 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.

To start the approval process:

1. Click the Navigator icon .
2. Under Workflow, click Manage Approvals.
3. From Scenario, Year, and Period, select a valid scenario, year, and period.
4. Click Go.

   In the graphical pie chart, you will see "no data displayed" if the Approval Unit Hierarchy has not yet started.

5. From the View drop-down on the top right, select Tree View.
6. Select an approval unit and click Start to begin the approval process.
7. From the confirmation message that the approval unit has been started, click OK.
   The Approved Status changes to Under Review.
   For a list of all Approval Unit levels and available actions, see "Reviewing and Approving Data" in Working with Financial Consolidation and Close.
8. Optional: If you want to re-start the approval process for a specific entity, you can select Exclude to remove an approval unit from the process, and reset the approval status to "Not Started".

   Caution:

   After you exclude an approval unit, all associated annotations and history are discarded. Data values are retained.