How You Set Up Approval Rules for Delegated Expense Reports

Oracle Fusion Expenses enables you to delegate expense entry to another person. To understand the approval process for delegated expense reports, it is necessary to understand the distinction between preparer, or creator, and owner.

The person who submits an expense report for another person called the preparer. The person who incurs the expenses is called the owner of the expense report.

Expenses provides predefined approval rules to support delegated expense report approval. When a preparer submits an expense report, the following approval process ensues.

• Approval by expense report owner

  In the first part of the approval process, the expense report is routed to the expense report owner for approval. The expense report has a status of Pending Individual Approval. The rule set for this part of the approval process is called the ExpenseReportApprovalStageExpenseReportD : ExpenseReportOwnerRuleSet in the BPM Worklist application.

• Approval by preparer's manager

  In the second part of the approval process, the expense report is routed to the preparer's manager hierarchy for approval. The Expense report has a status of Pending Manager Approval. The rule set for this part of the approval process is called ExpenseReportApprovalStage : ExpenseReportRuleSet in the BPM Worklist application.

This topic discusses the following two scenarios that require you to modify the rule sets if your company enables delegated expense entry.

• Bypass approval by owner

• Start approval with owner's manager

Based on your company policies, any one of the following scenarios can apply:

• Only bypass approval by owner

• Only start approval with owner's manager

• Both bypass approval by owner and start approval with owner's manager

• Neither bypass approval by owner nor start approval with owner's manager

Bypass Approval By Owner

If your company policy does not require expense report approval by the expense report owner, you can modify the rule set to bypass this approval. When bypassed, the expense report status is set to Pending Manager Approval. The expense report is routed to approvers based on the existing approval rules.

To bypass approval by the owner, perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Oracle BPM Worklist application.

2. Click the Administration link displayed in the corner of the page. The Administration tab appears.

3. Click the Task Configuration tab.

4. Click the Rules tab.

5. In the Tasks to be configured pane, select the FinExmWorkflowExpenseApproval task.

6. From the Select Ruleset choice list, select the following predefined rule set: SoaOLabel.ExpenseReportApprovalStageExpenseReportD : ExpenseReportOwnerRuleSet .

7. Select the Ignore this participant check box. This action tells the approval rule to ignore the owner as the first approver in the approval rule.

8. To save the modified rule set, click the Save icon in the Tasks to be configured pane.

9. To commit the modified rule set, click the Commit task icon in the Tasks to be configured pane.

Start Approval with Owner's Manager

The approval process routes the expense reports to the preparer's manager hierarchy.

If your company policy requires expense reports to be routed to the owner's manager hierarchy for approval, perform the following steps.

1. To navigate to the expense report approval taskflow, perform steps 1-5 in the preceding section.

2. From the Select Ruleset choice list, select the following predefined rule set: SoaOLabel.ExpenseReportApprovalStage : ExpenseReportRuleSet.

3. Click the Edit task icon (pencil) on the Tasks to be configured pane.

4. Expand the ExpenseReportManagerApproval rule.

5. In the List builder action 1 region, click in the Starting Participant field and scroll until you see ("supervisory",Task.creator,.

6. In the Starting Participant field, replace Task.creator with Task.payload.Expense Report Owner as shown in the following table.

   Predefined Value	Changed Value
   HierarchyBuilder.getManager("supervisory",Task.creator,-1,"","")	HierarchyBuilder.getManager("supervisory", Task.payload.Expense Report Owner,-1,"","")

7. To save the modified rule set, click the Save icon in the Tasks to be configured pane.

8. To commit the modified rule set, click the Commit task icon in the Tasks to be configured pane.

Caution: Expenses recommends that you evaluate any existing approval rules that use Task.creator as the first approver in an approval hierarchy to determine whether the first approver should be changed from task.creator to Task.payload.Expense Report Owner.