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: 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’s 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.

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 that might 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.

Configuration

The default delegate you select is used in two ways:

• It populates the User or user group field for each approver in the Manage delegates table

• It is automatically assigned to new approvers added later

When you first set up approval delegation, the default delegate is assigned to all approvers. Review the table and update delegates as needed to make sure each approver has the appropriate delegate. If an approver is using the default delegate, updating the default automatically updates their delegate.

Choose a delegate who has the same entity access and approval permissions as the approver. In many cases, this is a peer or the approver’s manager.

If you change the default delegate later:

• Approvers who are still using the default automatically inherit the updated delegate

• Approvers with manually assigned delegates are not affected

Only users or user groups with the same Purchasing approval level can be selected as delegates

Learn more about purchasing approval delegation.