Manager Approve Expenses

Privilege Needed: Manager or Alternate Approver

When an Expense User submits their Expense Report for approval, the Expense Report goes through a pre-defined approval group for each user. What approval group a person belongs to is defined in the person section by the Administrator. This approval group can have any number of managers defined in the group.

Each Submit of an Expense Report passes control to the first person in the Approval Group. As each manager Approves an Expense Report, control is then passed on to the next manager in the Approval Group until the last manager has approved the Expense Report. Once the last manager approves the Expense Report, that Expense Report is set to COMPLETED and is locked from being able to be retrieved by the original user.

The standard Approval Process will pass control of an expense report down the list of Approvers in an approval group. Unanet also has a Dynamic Approval Sequence, which allows for a streamlined approval flow.

See the note below about Automatic Approvals (e.g. submitters do not have to approve entries they just submitted).

Click here for more information about the different statuses in the approval process.

Below is an example of a Manager that has several Expense Reports that have been submitted for Approval and one Expense Report for which he is an Alternate. All the alternate's Expense Reports are shown in the bottom table. The top table shows the Expense Report for which he is the Primary Approver.

The manager can now do 1 of 3 things:

Approve the Expense Report without even looking at it by pressing the () icon.
Disapprove it without looking at it by pressing the () icon.
In most cases, the Manager will want to view the Expense Report by pressing the () icon.

Below is an example of a window that will pop up when the manager approves or disapproves an Expense Report. These comments are captured and stored in the Approval History table. The Approval History can always be displayed when viewing any Expense Report, located at the bottom of the document.

Below is an example of how the expense report is displayed to the manager after the () icon is pressed from the Approve Expenses window shown at the top. Here, the manager can see a full preview version of the expense report. The next table is the approval history section followed by the current controller and status.

From this screen, the manager can Approve or Disapprove the expense report; which will pop up the approval window shown above. Another option the manager has, rather than to just disapprove it, is to Edit the expense report. (Note: the Edit button can be disabled by setting the property unasense.expense.manager.edit=false). This will allow the manager to make the changes to the expense report and submit it for the owner. E-mail messages are sent to notify the owner that changes are being made to the expense report and it is being sent through the approval process again. Also, a record is put in the Approval History, showing that the manager changed the expense report and not the owner.

The Appr/Nxt button approves the current expense report without any comments and displays the next expense report in the Manager approval queue. The Skip button allows you to ignore the current timesheet and move on to the next in the approval queue.

Automatic Approvals (No Self Approval Required)

Note: User's are no longer required to approval their own entries -- at least, that's the basic premise. Actually, to be more specific, the individual that submits an expense report who also happens to be responsible for the primary approval -- will no longer have to approve the entry they just submitted (it will be automatically approved -- with a corresponding Approval History entry supplied by the system).

Example: when a user is also a manager, project manager or customer, and they submit their own expense report, these items will not appear on their own corresponding approval queue. If a delegate, however, submits an expense report for another user, and that other user is their own primary approver -- well that other user will still have to approve their own expense report (since they weren't the one that submitted it).

See Approval History example below:

One exception to this policy is the expense import. Automatic approvals are disabled when it comes to expenses entered into the system via the expense import.

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