Batch Approvals

Purpose of Batch Approval Rules:

Bundling journal or document transactions into groups or categories allows you to get your work done better and faster. In Fundamentals you can set approvals by either User Groups or individual User ID and then route approvals to:

• User – routed to a specific full or team user in the system
• Workflow User Groups – routed to a sequence of users, allowing for sequential as well as parallel approvals
• Approver IDs – as specified as the direct report user on the User Setup Card

Key Uses of Batch Approval Rules:

Once setup and implemented, the Batch Approvals Rules will help with:

• Reducing paper waste
• Increasing productivity in your data entry area
• Being more consistent in the application for and receipt of approvals throughout your organization.
• Implementing segregation of duties to ensure that a second person reviews and approves transactions before posting.

Special Vocabulary:

• Journal Batch- This is a way of organizing journal entries with common attributes together into a batch. Fundamentals allows you to allocate expenses to either a batch or to lines within journals.
• Approval Process- the method your organization uses to approve anything from documents, invoices, budgets and purchase orders to a new process you may want to implement once you’ve selected a software like Fundamentals. Automating approvals is an excellent way to make sure you maintain a consistency in the operation of your organization.
• If/then logic- a condition whose expression, when evaluated to true (condition satisfied) executes an associated set of actions.

Batch Approvals Rule Card

The Batch Approval Rules card is a subsection of the Business Rules menu in Fundamentals. When you select that menu option a page of Batch Approvals may appear. To edit any rule, double click on the Approval Number or to add a new rule click on +New in the action bar immediately below the menu bar. You’ll then be taken to a Batch Approval Card where you can set your own rules. When creating a new Batch Approval Rule, you will see that the first field in marked by a red Asterix (*) to indicate that the Number is a required field and you cannot continue without that field being filled in. There is also an on/off toggle switch that will allow you to turn your approval on or off manually.

The Batch Approval Card has two tabs:

• General Tab or the basic information that allows Fundamentals to recognize that a business rule is being applied to a transaction.The Effective Date allows the same No. to be modified when criteria change.
• Batch Approval Rule Details where you will set the conditions of your approvals and who the transactions should be routed to. This tab functions on an if/then formula and filters to route documents to appropriate people or groups.

In the Batch Approval Rule Details tab, the left side lets you set the conditions for Fundamentals to look for in data entry and the second column allows you to set the targeted approver or approval routing to employ.

In this example, all Payments entered by users in the “D365 ACCOUNTANTS” group must be approved by their direct supervisor as identified in the User Setup Card.

Once Enabled, this workflow will take place automatically and your data entry team need not break up their workdays running documents to different people for approval by hand. This will save them a lot of time and ensure that your prescribed business practices are respected and complied with automatically.  This also assures the the person entering the data may proceed to post the data after an approval by a different person.