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Working with approval requests

  • 6 min.

Nearly all aspects of the payment approval process can be managed directly from the payment journal. You can send approval requests, and approvers can approve or reject them while having a clear overview of each payment.

However, you can also access and review approval requests from the Role Center, using the Pending Approvals Cue group. Depending on your role, two Cues are available:

  • Requests Sent for Approval is an overview of all approval requests and their statuses.

  • Requests to Approve is an overview of all the approval requests that are pending your approval.

PM Role Center Payment Approval Cues

Important

Only users with the user roles Accountant, Business Manager, or Bookkeeper can access their payment approval requests directly from the Role Center.

Request an approval

You send the approval requests directly from the payment journal and the lines must have the status “Valid” before you can request their approval.

When setting up the workflow, the approval type you selected determines whether you can request approval for the entire journal batch or for the individual lines.

  • To send an approval request, in the payment journal, select Request Approval > Send approval request and choose either Selected Journal Lines or Journal Batch.
CB payment journal Request approval

Review approval requests

Depending on your role you can either review and manage approval requests from the Role Center > Requests to Approve where you only see requests assigned to you, or from the payment journal. The latter option is particularly helpful for accountants who work in the payment journal daily and also have approval duties.

Whichever option you choose, all the relevant information is readily available in the FactBox pane. You’ll be able to view the approval information including comments, the recipient’s bank details and verification status, and, importantly, the entries the payment applies.

CB Requests to approve

Note

If your user has been set up to receive email notifications for approvals, an email will be sent to you with a list of pending requests.

When you review the approval requests, you can either approve, reject, or delegate the request. Approving and rejecting are straightforward, but if you choose to delegate, you have the following options:

  • Approve & forward: The request is approved by you and then forwarded to a user of your choice. If that user approves, the request moves to the next user in the approval workflow, if any.

  • Forward without approval: The request is sent to a user of your choice. If that user approves, the request moves to the next user in the approval workflow, if any.

  • Forward and send back to me after approval: The request is sent to a user of your choice, and once they approve it, it'll be returned to you for approval. If you approve, the request will be sent to the next user in the approval workflow.

CB Requests to approve Delegate options

Note

You can only forward requests to users that are added to the standard Business Central User Setup. Moreover, when you forward a request, any approval limit is disregarded so that you can delegate approval requests to any users in the setup.

Track the approval requests

Approvers will inevitably catch and reject approval requests, and you, as an accountant, will have to correct the payment and handle the rejected request.

With the activation of Payment Approvals, the following three statuses were added to the payment journal to ensure you can always see the approval status of each payment line:

  • Pending Approval
  • Rejected Approval
  • Approved
PM Payment journal Approval status

You can easily track the approval status of each payment in the payment journal by checking the Status and Approval Status columns. Additionally, the Payment Management FactBox provides details on the approvers and any approval comments that may require your attention.

On the Role Center, the Requests Sent for Approval Cue keeps you updated on approval requests, showing you if any are still pending. This gives you a clear overview of when you can proceed with processing the payments.

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