Approval rule types
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Summary of Approval rule types
Approval rule types in ServiceNow define how approvals are created during the purchase requisition process. Procurement administrators can configure approval strategies and rules centrally to manage internal approval workflows before purchase orders are sent to suppliers. These rules determine the conditions and routing methods for generating approval plans, ensuring that purchases comply with organizational policies.
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Approval Rule Types and Their Use Cases
- Dynamic Users or Groups: Approvals are dynamically assigned to users or groups based on attributes of the purchasing user, such as cost center managers. Approvals are sent in parallel.
- Managerial Job Code Hierarchy: Approvals route through users based on job codes within a management hierarchy. Approval routing can be parallel or sequential, requiring either all or any approvers. Useful for enforcing approval limits tied to job roles.
- Managerial Hierarchy: Approvals are triggered based on the user’s management chain, routed parallel or sequentially to all, direct, or most senior managers up to a specific job code.
- Specified Users or Groups: Approvals are sent to explicitly specified users or groups in parallel, regardless of user attributes or hierarchy.
- Cost Center Managers: For requisitions with costs allocated across multiple cost centers, approvals are sent in parallel to each cost center manager. Partial or full approvals are supported per item or purchase line. Managers receive email notifications and can approve via email or various ServiceNow interfaces.
- Self-approved Purchases: Requesters with sufficient purchasing authority, job code, or designation can self-approve purchases. An audit trail is maintained, though no approval tasks are created by default. Administrators can configure whether these requesters must still provide explicit approval decisions by toggling the "Allow automatic approval" flag.
Practical Considerations for ServiceNow Customers
- Centralized configuration of approval rules simplifies managing diverse approval processes across the organization.
- Choosing the appropriate approval rule type ensures that approval routing aligns with organizational roles, budgets, and cost allocations.
- Administrators must verify the state of the "Allow automatic approval" flag to control self-approval behavior and ensure approval tasks are generated as intended.
- Cost center manager approvals support granular cost allocation scenarios, enabling precise approval control based on spending responsibility.
- Approval routing methods (parallel or sequential) and decision methods (all or any approvers) provide flexibility to tailor approval workflows.
Approval rule types determine the methods by which approvals are created during the purchase requisition process.
As a procurement administrator, you can define an approval strategy and create approval rules to approve a purchase internally before it’s converted to a purchase order and sent to a supplier. This is a one-place configuration that can drive any kind of approval process that your organization may need.
| Approval rule type | Description | Example Scenario |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamic Users or Groups | Approvals are dynamically created and sent to the specified user or group. Approvals are triggered based on the purchasing user's attributes. The approval routing method is restricted to just sending approvals in parallel. | If approval is required from the purchasing user's cost center manager, then at the time when the purchase requisition is sent to pending approval, the rule looks at the record for the user in the Business Owner field, dot-walks to the referenced cost center, and sends an approval to whoever is the referenced user in the Manager field on the cost center. |
| Managerial Job Code Hierarchy | Approvals are triggered based on the purchasing user's job code and manager's job code. The approval routing method can be parallel or sequential, and the approval decision method can be all approvers or any approver. | If approval is required from all users up to the user with an authorized code, then an approval is sent to all users within a management hierarchy up to the user with an authorized job code for the approved purchasing limit that covers the total amount of the purchase requisition. If approval is required from the most junior user with an authorized code, then an approval is sent to the most junior user within a management hierarchy up to the user with an authorized job code for the approved purchasing limit that covers the total amount of the purchase requisition. |
| Managerial Hierarchy | Approvals are triggered based on the purchasing user's manager's hierarchy. The approval routing method can be parallel or sequential, and the approval decision method can be all approvers or any approver. | If approval is required from all managers in hierarchy, then an approval is sent to all users in the purchasing user's (business owner) management hierarchy up to the job code specified, when the approval trigger conditions are met. If approval is required from the direct manager alone, then an approval is sent to the user's manager in the purchasing user's (business owner) management hierarchy. If approval is required from the most senior manager, then an approval is sent to the most senior manager in the purchasing user's (business owner) management hierarchy up to the job code specified. |
| Specified Users or Groups | Approvals are triggered based on the specified users or groups. The approval routing method is restricted to just sending approvals in parallel. | |
| Cost Center Managers | Approvals are triggered only for purchase requisitions, from multiple cost center managers. The approval routing method is restricted to just sending approvals in parallel. | If the cost of a purchase requisition is allocated across many cost centers, approvals are sent to each cost center manager for the cost allocation amount needing approval. If an individual item in the purchase requisition has cost allocated across multiple cost centers, all the cost center managers must provide their approval for the amount of that item to be approved. The purchase requisition can be partially or completely approved depending on the approval decision for each individual item or purchase line. Cost center managers receive email notifications for their approval with details of the purchase and the allocated amount needing approval. They can provide their approval directly from the email, or complete their approval in Shopping Hub, Employee Center, Virtual Agent, or Shopping Hub Mobile. |
Self-approved purchases
For requesters who possess the right purchasing authority, job code, or belong to designations that meet a defined purchasing approval matrix, their purchases are self-approved. An audit trail is made available, where an approval plan is created with the approval type as Self Approved, and in the Closed Complete state, though no actual approval tasks are created.