Flow groups

Flow groups are used to manage approvals based on suppliers or organisational units.

Setting up flow groups

You set up approval based on flow groups, in one or several steps with one or several approvers. If you create steps, step 1 needs to be approved before sending to step 2, and so on. The settings are saved in the Flow group and Flow group member tables.

  1. In the main menu, select Flow groups under New features.
  2. Enter a name for the flow group.
  3. For each step in the flow, assign one or several approvers. If you select more than one approver, also determine if approval has to be done by all approvers in that step.
  4. Assign the flow group to a supplier in the Associate table and/or an organisational unit in the Organisational unit 1 - Organisational unit 12 tables, and define the Attestation amount limit.

Example

In this example, we will set up 8 approvers in an organisational matrix where Approver 1 reports to Approver 2, Approver 2 reports to Approver 3 and so on, and the different approvers can approve either a very low amount or a rather high amount.
Approver name Attestation amount limit
Approver 1 1
Approver 2 1
Approver 3 1
Approver 4 10000
Approver 5 1
Approver 6 1
Approver 7 1
Approver 8 10000

Approver 1, 2 and 3 have an amount limit of 1, while Approver 4 has an amount limit of 10,000. Approver 5, 6 and 7 have a very low limit, while Approver 8 has a rather high limit, similar to the situation for Approvers 1-4.

The behaviour when an invoice of an amount higher than 1 but lower than 10000 is to be approved differs depending on the setting Add approvers when amount limit is exceeded in the Workflow processing field in the Company information table:

  • If enabled, all 8 approvers will be added to the flow.
  • If disabled, the approvers with insufficient limit will be skipped and the invoice will go directly to Approver 4.

Sending multiple batches to approval at the same time

You can send more than one batch for approval at the same time. If you select several rows in the Batch table and select the Send to Approval processing, a dialog is displayed, where you can edit each individual flow, if needed, before sending the batches.

If you have selected batches without a flow, or if the flow hasn't been correctly defined, this will be displayed in red. If the batch has already been sent, this will be also be displayed in red.

Approval without flow groups

You can enable approval without flow groups, similar to the legacy functionality, but without using the Number of approval steps field in the Company information table.

You enable approval without flow groups by using the Auth. responsible field in the Associate table for calculating the flow. If you leave the Flow group field blank, and only use the field Auth. responsible, the employee number is used as basis for calculating the flow instead of the flow group.

You can also add approvers manually in the Send to approval dialog.