Enhanced interface

Approve journal entries

Use the Approve Journal Entries page to review transactions assigned to you. You can approve or decline transactions and add optional comments to explain your decisions.

If you'll be unavailable to approve transactions, you can delegate your approval responsibilities, if approval delegation is enabled. When you turn on out-of-office approval delegation in your personal preferences, new approval requests are sent to your delegate approver.

If notifications are enabled, you’ll receive a notification that approvals are waiting.

If you do not see an approval after you receive a notice, you could be part of a group designated as the approver for the given journal. If another group member has already approved the entry, it no longer appears in the list.

Subscription	General Ledger
Regional availability	All regions
User type	Business user
Permissions	Approve Journal Entries
Prerequisites	Approvals are enabled and configured

Review transaction details and history

Go to General Ledger > All > Journal entries > Approve journal entries.

To see transactions submitted to all approvers, select View all.
To see transactions submitted to you, select View submitted.
To see details and history for 1 transaction, select View.

An entry must be submitted before it appears in the Approval list. Draft entries do not appear in the list.

If you’re using GL Outlier Detection

When you use GL Outlier Detection, an extra column appears in the transaction list: Outliers.

GL Outlier Detection is a machine learning tool that evaluates transaction data and flags transactions that are outside the historical norm for your organization.

The Outlier column shows the state of Outlier detection:

Empty ( ): The transaction has not been evaluated yet, even though it’s been submitted. Evaluation can take a while after submission.
An exclamation mark (Outlier exclamation): At least one line entry in the transaction is an outlier.
A dash (Nonoutlier dash): No outliers have been detected in the transaction based on your historical data and the model.

View the line-item detail for more information about the outlier. Use this information to help you determine the correct action to take on the transaction.

Approve or decline entries

To act on 1 entry:

Go to General Ledger > All > Journal entries > Approve journal entries.
Find the transaction in the list.
Select View to see the transaction details.
Select Approve or Decline.
Optionally, enter a comment explaining your reason for the action.

If you decline the entry, your comment is included in an email that's sent to the person who submitted it.

If you approve the entry, your comment is not included in the email, but it's saved in the history.
Select Approve or Decline again.

To act on multiple entries at the same time:

You cannot enter a comment when approving or declining entries using this method.

Go to General Ledger > All > Journal entries > Approve journal entries.
Select the checkbox in the first column next to the entries.
Select the Approve or Decline button.

If a journal entry has an automatic reversal, only 1 approval is required. This is because the user posts the initial journal entry and the reversing journal entry in a single action.

A scheduled recurring journal entry requires an approval for each occurrence of the scheduled entry because an approval request is initiated for each occurrence.

Approving your own entries

In Configure General Ledger, there's an option to allow users to approve their own entries. So, for example, if you're the approver for the General Journal, and you submit an entry to that journal, it's automatically approved. You can approve your own entries only if you're an approver for the respective journal.

If Employee manager approval is selected in the Approver column for a journal, the Submitter can approve own entries option is bypassed. In this case, the entry is submitted to the submitter's manager for approval.

Partially approved transactions

If an entry appears in the Partial approval state, it means that your company has set up approval for multiple approvers (an approval chain) and that at least one but not all of the approvers have approved the entry.

To complete the approval or declination of the entry, contact the user whose approval is required to take the appropriate action.