Managing approval levels for a cost center

[kirkr]

We are looking at sending approvals to the proper person when a request is being made that has a cost associated it. Approvals are based on the amount the request is in total on the service catalog. The approval to order would be sent to the appropriate person or auto-approve if they are the one that put in the request that is allowed to approve.

Is there an OOTB method to track these?

I wasn't able to find anything and was looking at building a custom table that ties to the Cost Center [cmn_cost_center] table.

Reference to cost center

Reference to user

Currency field of approval amount

Has anyone done anything like this with the system, and does this seem like a reasonable approach

[Uncle Rob]

Only reason you'd need a table in the middle is if you need multiple approvers and thresholds for any given cost center.   It sounds like "who approves" and "approve over threshold" are both single properties of any given cost center... so you might just add them as fields there.

In the OOB "Service Catalog Request" workflow there is already an example of triggering an approval only if a threshold is breached.   In the OOB case its checking raw total.  

It would be easy enough to throw a comparison in the IF condition like so...

Then just make sure the approval activity fires at the right person, like so...

[Uncle Rob]

Smash that Correct Answer button if this did it for you, friend.

[kirkr]

What I was going for with the middle table is due to having multiple possible approval levels

For example

• Cost Center: 123
• Manager A
  • Approvals up to $10,000
• Director A
  • Approvals up to $45,000

Above those, it'd be a VP approval. I'm torn between adding those directly to the existing Cost Center table and making a middle table.

[Uncle Rob]

That's going to amp up the complexity quite a bit.   Now you can't rely on a simple dot-walk to the appropriate approval.  
You're going to have to decide what level of approval gets triggered and when.  

In your scenario are you saying that if the price is $30,000 that ONLY the Director can approve?