About purchasing approval delegation

Everyone needs a break from the office. Using approval delegation ensures that transactions submitted for approval keep moving through the approval process even if approvers are away.

When your organization uses approval delegation, approvers can delegate their approval responsibilities to someone else when they are not available for any reason.

Turning on and configuring approval delegation gives approvers the ability to set themselves to out-of-office for purchasing approvals. While an approver is set to out-of-office in their user preferences, Sage Intacct automatically reroutes new approval requests to their assigned delegate user or user group.

Example: Assume that in your organization, the following approvers have been assigned the following delegates:

Approvers and delegates example
Approver Delegate
Emily Woo Tom Hong
James McGrath

Lucy Martinez
Ken Nguyen Tom Hong
Lucy Martinez Ken Nguyen  
Tom Hong

Lucy Martinez

  1. If Emily Woo's approval is needed and she is out-of-office, the approval request is rerouted to Tom Hong.

  2. If Tom is out-of-office, the approval request is sent to Lucy Martinez.

  3. If Lucy Martinez is out-of-office, the approval request is sent to Ken Nguyen.

If a user group is configured as an approval delegate, all members of the group can view the approval request . However, the transaction definition configuration ensures only unrestricted group members can approve or decline.

Delegation setup considerations

When you set up delegation, consider the out-of-office and routing logic.

Approval routing

  • New approval requests are rerouted to a delegate only when the approver has turned on out-of-office for approvals in their preferences. See Set delegate approval.
  • If a delegate is also out-of-office, the approval request is rerouted to the delegate's delegate. Sage Intacct only tries rerouting an approval request 3 times. After the third time, the approval request is rerouted back to the original approver.
  • The delegate user or user group assumes responsibility for any approval requests until the approver turns off out-of-office for purchasing approvals, or the specified start and end dates have passed.
  • Approval requests for permission-based value approvals (Value Approval and Value Approval: Progressive) are only rerouted to a delegate with the same value permission level.
  • Restricted users can be set as the default delegate. This allows a restricted delegate to view transactions which may include unrestricted location or department lines. The restricted user can only approve or decline transactions to which they have unrestricted access to all lines.

Notification

  • When an approval request is rerouted to a delegate, the approver no longer sees the transaction in the Approve transactions list page.
  • Email notifications for rerouted approval requests are issued to delegates if email notification is enabled in two places: the Configure Purchasing page and the delegate's personal preferences page.
Approval requests are sent to each member of a delegate user group with email notifications enabled in their preferences.

Configuration

The user or user group you select as the Default delegate serves two purposes:

  • To populate the User or user group field for each Approver in the Manage delegates table.

  • To assign to any user who is added to the list of Approvers. The Default delegate selection can be changed at any time.

    When you first set up approval delegation, Sage Intacct automatically assigns the Default delegate to each Approver in the table. A best practice is to go through the table and ensure that an appropriate delegate is selected for each approver—the default delegate user or user group must have the same entity and value permissions as the Approver. For some approvers, a peer in their department or their manager might be the appropriate approval delegate.

     

    If an Approver's delegate is the default and you later update the Default delegate, the Approver's delegate automatically changes to match the new default setting.

Only users and user groups with the same Purchasing approval level can be selected as an Approval delegate.

Learn more about purchasing approval delegation.