Approving expense forms in a multi-level hierarchy

There are no differences in the steps for approving and rejecting expense forms when your company uses a multi-level approval hierarchy. For your information, however, we outline below the process that the e-xpense program follows to send an expense form to the appropriate approvers.

Knowledge of this process can help you understand why an expense form that you are authorized to approve has not yet appeared in your list, even though the employee has already submitted it. Until the expense form is fully approved at lower levels, it will not appear in the lists of approvers at your level.

When an employee submits a pre-authorization request or expense report, e-xpense does the following

For each first-level approver only, adds the expense form to the approver’s list of pending forms, and sends an email to the approver.

When an approver approves a pre-authorization request or expense report, e-xpense does the following

1. Updates the expense form’s approval status to Approved for that approver.

2. If the approver is part of an approver/auditor group, updates the expense form’s approval status to Approved for all other approvers in the same group.

3. If the expense form reaches the minimum number of required signatures for the current approval level:

• If it is the final level of approval, updates the expense form’s request/report status to Approved and sends an email to the employee.

• If it is not the final level of approval, adds the expense form to each next-level approver’s list of pending forms, and sends an email to them. The program also performs step 4 below.

4. If the expense form does not reach the minimum number of required signatures for the current approval level, checks all upper approval levels to see if the approver is also defined as an approver at a higher level. If so, then the program creates a database record for the approver at that level and sets the record’s approval status to Approved.
   
   Note: An approver can be assigned to more than one approval level. This step of the process ensures that an approver will not have to approve the same expense form more than once.

When an approver rejects a pre-authorization request or expense report, e-xpense does the following

1. Updates the expense form’s approval status to Rejected for all approvers in both the current approval level and any lower approval levels that had already fully approved the form.

2. Sends an email to the employee and to all approvers in both the current approval level and any lower approval levels that had already fully approved the form.

When an approver changes a pre-authorization request or expense report, e-xpense does the following

1. For the approver who changed the form, updates the expense form’s approval status to Approved (if the approver approved the form after changing it) or Rejected (if the approver rejected the form after changing it). If the approver rejected the form, see the previous section for the process. If the approver approved the form, see the remaining two steps below.

2. Updates the expense form’s approval status to Pending for all approvers in both the current approval level and any lower approval levels that had already fully approved the form. Because the form was changed, anyone who already approved it has to re-approve it.

3. Sends an email to the employee and to all approvers in both the current approval level and any lower approval levels that had already fully approved the form.