Journal entry approval overview

Journal entry approvals are specific to general ledger transactions that are directly posted to a specific journal. Transactions that are not submitted directly, for example, transactions submitted to a subledger, are not approved this way.

Journal entry approval is optional - you do not need to require approvals for journal entries. If you configure the general ledger journal for approvals, every submission to post a journal entry will require approval.

When users submit entries directly to the ledger, they require approval. But approvals also affect journal entries from:

  • Recurring transactions
  • Memorized transactions
  • Transaction templates
  • CSV imports
  • Web services
Subscription

General Ledger

Regional availability

All regions

User type Business user
Permissions

Journal entries: List, View, Edit, Add

Approvals: List
Previous step Set up approvals

Email notifications

Sage Intacct can be set up to send you email notifications about transactions awaiting your approval. Depending on how your system is set up, a notification email is sent:

  • Every time a transaction approval is requested.
  • Once a day. Lists all the requests received that day.
  • Once a week. Lists all the requests received that week.
  • Once a month. Lists all the requests received that month.
If you’re assigned to multiple journals, you’ll receive 1 notification per journal with the journal name included.

If email notification is turned off, regularly check the Approve Journal Entries page to see transactions awaiting your approval.

Journal entry approval workflow

Journal entry approvals differ slightly from most application approvals. The process is more straightforward. They are not based on values and value thresholds, but on approvers that you configure.

The journal entry approvals process has 3 basic steps: setup, submission, and approval.

1. Set up approvals

  • Enable approvals in the General Ledger.
  • Add approvers and grant approval permissions for journals.
  • Create administrative approver and substitute approvers.

2. Create and submit journal entries

  • User creates and submits a journal entry.
  • Approver or alternate is notified of the approval requirement.

3. Approve or decline entries

  • If General Ledger Outlier Detection is enabled, the entry is evaluated.
  • The entry is approved or declined.
  • If approved, the entry is posted.
  • If declined, the entry is edited or sent back for resubmission.

Set up journal entry approval

Setting up the General Ledger for journal entry approvals is a multi-step process, which is described fully in Set up journal entry approvals.

Briefly, the steps needed are:

  1. Enable journal entry approval in the General Ledger configuration. This is also where you assign an admin approver, who can step in and approve entries if needed.
  2. Grant journal entry approval permissions to users. Only users who already have the Journal Entry Approver permission will be selectable as approvers or substitute approvers.
    Best practice: Create a role with the Approve Journal Entries permission, and then add the appropriate users as needed.
  3. Define journal entry approvals for each General Ledger journal that requires approval. Each journal can have either 1 or a chain of approvers. For journals that do not require approval, leave the journal off the list.

General Ledger Outlier Detection

If your company has it enabled, general ledger entries submitted for approval can be evaluated automatically for historical outliers. Outlier Detection is another tool that you can use to determine how a submission is managed.

Additionally you can enable the Outlier Assistant, which changes the workflow to route flagged outliers back to the submitter for re-evaluation.

For more information, see GL Outlier Detection overview.

Manage Approval submissions

When an entry is submitted, it's sent for approval. Draft entries are not sent for approval.

The approver for an entry can do the following:

  • Approve the entry. The entry goes into the general ledger.
  • Decline the entry and send it back to the submitter to make any changes and resubmit.
  • Decline the entry, edit it, and then approve it. In this case, anyone else in the approval chain must reapprove the entry.

Partially approved journal entries

If entries require approval from multiple approvers, partially approved means that at least 1 approver has approved the entry, but not all approvers.

For more information, see Approve journal entries.

Transaction approver

  • If an approver edits a transaction, the approver is considered a submitter. If the approver (now the submitter) can self-approve, the transaction is approved. If the approver or submitter cannot self-approve, the substitute approver is notified.
  • If the approver approves the transaction, the journal entry is sent to the next level for approval, if Intacct is configured for multiple approvals.
  • If the employee manager is set as the second or third level approver, and no edits were done in the previous levels, they're the manager of the original submitter.
  • If the employee manager approver is at the second, third, or further level, and a previous approver made a change, the approver making the change is treated as the submitter. The approval request will go to their Employee Manager rather than to the user who created the entry.
  • If Employee Manager Approver is duplicated, it’s skipped and it will pick the next level of approval if any. Otherwise it gets posted.

Restricting users

For approvals, if a user has restrictions added after that user was granted permissions, that user does not see any portion of the entry that falls under their restriction. The user is blocked from approving a transaction if they do not see the complete transaction.

For example:

  • There's an unrestricted user who is an approver and the user is later restricted to specific entities.

  • The user is no longer able to approve entries that refer to other entities. In fact, they will not even see the associated detail related to those entities.