Managing Approval Units in Forms

You can review approval data and perform approval unit actions such as Start, Stop, Take Ownership, and Promote directly from data forms, without navigating to the Approvals page. When you create a form, you can select to show approval unit information such as Status, Owner, Previous Owner, Last Action Taken, and Total Values. Service Administrators can view and work with all available approval units. Users can perform actions on approval units based on the approval unit status and their security access.

To manage approval units in forms, you must be a Service Administrator.

You can design different context menus for different levels of users, to make only a specific set of approval unit actions available to certain users. You can then attach the menu to a form and apply security to the form. The context menus and Change Status actions dynamically adapt based on the status of the approval unit in the workflow.

When you select the Use Metric option, you can work with members of the HSP_Metric dimension, which enables you to display approval unit totals directly on forms.

Note:

Before working with approval units in forms, Service Administrator set up the approval process, including defining approval unit hierarchies, assigning the approval unit hierarchy to a specific Scenario, Year and Period, and setting up validation rules. See Managing Approvals.

These approval actions are available from forms:

  • Change Status of an approval unit, such as Promote or Reject
  • Change approval unit owner if needed
  • Add comments in the annotation area
  • View annotations and status history

To manage approval units in forms:

  1. Create a new form.

  2. On the Properties tab, specify the form properties, and select the Use Metric option to use HSP_Metric dimension members and display approval unit totals in the form.

  3. On the Layout tab, from the member selector, select approval unit members to display on the form.

  4. On the Other Options tab, from Context Menus, select the Change Status context menu from Available Menus and move it to Selected Menus.

  5. Optional: Select Filter Actions by Template, then select an Approval template, such as Bottom Up or Consolidation.

    Depending on the approval template assigned to the Approval Unit Hierarchy, the review path and actions will vary.

  6. Optional: Select Approval Status to display the approval unit status on the form.

  7. Optional: Select Hide Prompt to have the action performed immediately without a prompt for additional information.

  8. Optional: Select Show Annotation to display the history of annotations that users have made to the approval unit.

  9. Finish setting form options and save the form.