Approval rule types
Summarize
Summary of Approval rule types
Approval rule types are essential for defining how approvals are managed during the purchase requisition process in ServiceNow. As a procurement administrator, you can configure approval strategies that streamline the internal approval of purchase requisitions before they are converted into purchase orders.
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Key Features
- Dynamic Users or Groups: Approvals are generated based on the purchasing user's attributes, allowing for parallel approval routing.
- Managerial Job Code Hierarchy: Approvals are based on the purchasing user's job code and manager's job code, supporting both parallel and sequential routing depending on approval conditions.
- Managerial Hierarchy: Trigger approvals through the purchasing user's management hierarchy, with options for parallel or sequential routing and different decision criteria.
- Specified Users or Groups: Approvals sent to designated users or groups, strictly in parallel.
- Cost Center Managers: Approvals managed by multiple cost center managers, allowing for partial or complete approval based on allocations.
- Self-approved purchases: Requesters with appropriate authority can self-approve their purchases, with an audit trail maintained for transparency.
Key Outcomes
Implementing these approval rule types enables organizations to customize their approval workflows effectively, ensuring that purchase requisitions are reviewed and approved efficiently. Additionally, procurement administrators can adjust settings to manage the approval process flexibly based on organizational needs, improving overall procurement governance and compliance.
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.