Once an invoice has landed in the Invoices App in Onit, its approval process begins immediately. The number of approval Phases required and the name of each Phase depends upon your client’s business needs. The approval workflow can be very simple (e.g., invoices may require only a single approver) or more complex (e.g., many approvers, some of which might be conditional).
Phase Configuration
Each step in the approval process should be its own Phase. You may want to require some Participants’ approvals conditionally; in this case, your Phases should be configured to “hold” an invoice in a Phase only if a particular Participant is assigned to the invoice.
The invoice approval process always occurs between the New and Approved phases of your Invoices App.
In general:
- It’s OK to edit, rename, or delete any of the Phases circled in red above.
- It’s OK to create new Phases within the red box shown above.
- Do not edit or delete any of the Phrases not circled in red above.
Invoice App Phases
The following briefly describes each out-of-the-box Phase in the Invoices App.
- New: Though this is technically the first Phase in the App, out-of-the-box configuration automatically moves the Record through this Phase and into the first approval-based Phase (e.g., Pending Invoice Approver 1).
- Pending Invoice Approver 1-5: Placeholder Phases intended to be customized. These Phases represent your entire business approval process. You will need at least one of these Phases in almost all cases.
- Held: If an invoice fails validation, it should be configured to move to this Phase. No out-of-the-box configuration provides invoice validation; this must be built for each client. In almost all cases, validation occurs directly after an invoice has been fully approved (by all approvers).
- Approved through Paid: Do not edit or delete any of these Phases. Also, please don't modify any Actions in the Invoices App that deal with these Phases. Many out-of-the-box configurations related to these phases allow Onit to work successfully with BillingPoint.
Invoice App Roles
The Roles outlined in red below are placeholders used to assign participants to approval Phases. These Roles are assigned by a Looped Action named the Build Approval Chain.
This Looped Action will first check the approval amount of the matter’s requester (i.e., Initial Invoice Approver); if their approval amount is sufficient, the loop will end. If the Initial Invoice Approver’s approval amount is insufficient, the Build Approval Chain Action will perform a lookup to access the requester’s direct superior and add them as Invoice Approver 1 (and so on) on the invoice. The loop will end once an approver with sufficient approval rights is assigned to the invoice or after the Action has added five approvers.
Adding Participants
When Participants are added to a Phase, the Phase becomes “active” and will “hold” the Record until all relevant Participants have approved it.
Any existing Add Participant Actions in the Invoices App can be edited or deleted as necessary.
Conditionally Adding Participants
There are several ways to add Participants to your invoice approval workflow conditionally.
- Decision Table: Leverage a decision table to add Participants when Conditions on Field values are met. For more information, see Onit’s Adding Participants from a Decision Table tutorial.
- Approval Authority: If a client requires approvals based on approval authority levels, define the dollar amount a user can approve on their Record in the User Profiles App. You can then leverage this property to require their approval conditionally based on the invoice’s amount.
Tip: The following Liquid enables you to extract Field values off of User Profiles Records:
{% assign my_user = '[email protected]' | email_to_user | user_preferences_for_user %}{{my_user.Field_name}}