Approving Invoices

This chapter provides an overview of the invoice approval process and discusses how to:

• Define invoice approval levels.

• Process invoice approvals.

• Initiate invoice approval workflow.

Understanding Invoice Approval

The Voucher Approval Creation Application Engine process (EM_VO_APR_AE) triggers approval workflow, notifying the appropriate buyer approvers and adding the respective invoices to their summary worklist. Buyers then view their summary worklist from their dashboard page and approve invoices.

According to the security established, buyer approvers are presented only with those invoices for their associated business units and the monetary amounts specified during buyer registration.

You also approve individual invoice lines. You can set up the system to route any invoice line to one or more approvers in your organization with whom the line is associated, and these approvers can also dispute invoice lines. We cover line-level approval and dispute in the Approving and Disputing Invoice Lines chapter.

There is a slight timing difference involving invoice status changing to pre-approved after the Voucher Build Application Engine process (AP_VCHRBLD) is run. If a buyer not requiring invoice header approval shares the tableset control for Payables business unit options (AP_01) with a buyer that does require invoice header approval, invoices for the buyer not requiring header approval remain as pending until the Voucher Approval Creation process is run. If a buyer does not require approvals and has its own Payables business unit options, invoices are considered pre-approved after the Voucher Build process runs.

Approving Invoices in the Buyer Direct Model

Information in this chapter applies to both models (Buyer Direct and Business Service Provider), but there are a few issues to bear in mind when approving invoices in the Buyer Direct model:

• You must run the Voucher Approval Creation process in eSettlements to record the approval history.

• If an approver approves or partially approves an invoice in eSettlements—according to the buyer's monetary level approval requirements—and then changes are made to any of the following fields using the voucher entry pages in Payables, the invoice will require reapproval.

  When changes are made to any of these fields in Payables for a particular voucher, a temporary table (EM_VOAPRDAT_TAO) is populated with the voucher information. This table is then used to indicate which vouchers require reapproval.

  • Invoice ID

  • Invoice Date

  • Vendor ID

  • Voucher Gross Amount

  • Sales Tax Amount

  • VAT Amount

  • Freight Amount

  • Miscellaneous Charges Amount

  • Transaction Currency

  • Payment Terms

Email notifications alert approvers that voucher reapproval is pending. During the Voucher Approval Creation process, the system compares any vouchers that are in the temporary table with the vouchers that need to undergo approval. If a match is found, the system sends a reapproval email notification to the approver (as opposed to an initial approval email notification) because at that point it is actually the second time the approver must approve the voucher.

See Also

PeopleTools PeopleBook: PeopleSoft Workflow

Understanding Voucher Management

PeopleSoft Enterprise Payables 8.9 PeopleBook

Defining Invoice Approval Levels

During buyer registration the buyer administrator establishes invoice approval information and creates user profiles with approval roles corresponding to the buyer's specified approval level requirements. The buyer administrator also attaches monetary limits to the approval levels.

The user profile defines the specific role for the approver, and lists the business units (buying entity IDs) each approver is responsible for approving. Only those roles assigned to one of the buyer role types of buyer user are eligible to be selected as approval roles. You use the Review Buyer Details - Notifications and Approvals page to select role for approval routing, and optionally define a specified number of reminder days.

eSettlements uses reminder days functionality so that if an invoice remains in any approver's worklist beyond the specified number of reminder days without the approver taking any action on the invoice, the approver receives another email notification to remind that the invoice still needs to be approved.

Note. Buyers can set up their own roles and can use the delivered demonstration data as a basis for this.

See Also

Understanding Buyer Registration

PeopleTools PeopleBook: PeopleSoft Workflow

Creating New Buyer Users

Processing Invoice Approvals

Buyer approvers have easy access to invoices needing review and approval. With invoice and line detail information links, invoice approval can be by invoice, or by invoice line. Each approver accesses their summary worklist on the Buyer Dashboard page.

If you have invoices in the approval process, and want to change header approval amount levels or turn off header approval, you should first complete the approval of those invoices that are already in process.

Note. We discuss line-level invoice approval in a subsequent chapter.

The approval workflow process must actually be run before the first approver accesses their invoices to approve, and it must also be run subsequently so that the next approvers receive email indicating that there are invoices that await their approval.

Here's how you process invoices for approval:

1. Review invoices.

2. Review invoice header details.

3. (Optional) Review invoice lines.

4. Place invoices on hold.

5. Approve invoices, initiating the invoice approval workflow.

This section discusses how to process invoice approvals.

See Also

Reviewing, Approving, and Disputing Invoice Lines

Page Used to Process Invoice Approvals

Processing Invoice Approvals

Access the Review Invoices - Invoice Inquiry page.

Click the Select All link to select all the Invoice ID check boxes in the Sel (select) column, or select individual check boxes for invoices to approve, then click the Approve button to preview a summary of the invoices you are about to approve.

Note. Before selecting all invoices to approve, select an Invoice Status of My Pending, then click search. The My Pending invoice status filters data such that only those invoices requiring approval by the user accessing the page display in the search results.

Click the Clear All link to clear all selected check boxes.

Important! When you click the Select All link you are selecting all invoices for approval—even those that appear on the next page or pages. To ensure that you first view all the invoices subject to action, click the appropriate links in the Invoice Summary group box header before deciding to click the Select All link.

We discuss the additional functionality of this page in the Managing Invoices for Buyers chapter.

See Also

Reviewing Invoices

Initiating Invoice Approval Workflow

Once the system processes invoices, the system administrator runs the Voucher Approval Creation process to populate the invoice approval pages and trigger email notifications so appropriate buyer approvers can review and approve their invoices.

The Voucher Approval Creation process also triggers the voucher reapproval routine for vouchers that are modified in Payables after being approved in eSettlements. Only when certain voucher fields are modified in Payables does this result in reapproval notification.

When the system routes email notifications by role, all users associated with the role and having access to the buyer will receive the notification.

This section discusses how to initiate approval workflow.

Note. We listed these fields previously in this chapter.

See Also

Approving Invoices in the Buyer Direct Model

Pages Used to Initiate Approval Workflow

Initiating Approval Workflow

Access the Process Scheduler Request page.

Select Voucher Approval Creation and click OK to start the process. The system processes error-free invoices that are in a postable status and are not subject to matching, or are postable and matched. The system then generates email notification to all buyer users associated with the approval roles defined on the Review Buyer Details pages during registration of their organization.

When a user in a particular approver role approves an invoice, they are in fact approving that invoice for all other users within that role. View the invoice life cycle to see at what stage an invoice is within the process, to see which users have and have not approved a given invoice, and—if you are in the approval path—to approve an invoice as well.

See Also

Processing Invoice Approvals