Admin Home > Approvals > Approval Chains
You can customise approval chains to determine how transactions interact with those chains and the approval groups within them.
This guide explores the customisation options available and how to use them.
Configuring the approval groups in a chain
When you open an approval chain, you can see its approval groups and their order at the bottom of the screen.
Click a group to open the criteria screen for further options.
These fields are available from this screen:
Hide During Lookups
This option is useful if the person raising the request is also found in the approval chain. If so, the search criteria for the request will skip any previous groups, and instead will contact the approval group in the chain where the user is located.
The IT Director may want to raise a request and have it sent straight to their approval group in the chain. Having Hide During Lookups selected will jump the IT Manager group and go straight into the IT Director group for approval.
Users can only approve once
This option is useful for longer approvals chains, where a user may appear in a number of groups.
Making this selection on a group will ensure that a user who has already approved the transaction can't interact with the same transaction further down the approvals chain if they have access to multiple groups.
Self Approval
Check this option and set a value in the box to allow self-approval.
Self-approval allows the approver to approve their own requests automatically as long as the transaction doesn't exceed the amount stated.
Advanced Criteria
This is where you can make more complex criteria on the approval group in a chain.
Here, you can apply criteria on some header information. Although we recommend that header information is handled in the Approval Selector.
This page allows for two optional advanced functions that can be assigned to a group.
If you find that you need more advanced options, we recommend that you make these configuration changes one step up at approval selector level rather than in the chain.
Scroll down for examples of advanced criteria that you can apply to a group.
Approvers Count
This field looks at how many approvers have already approved the transaction within the chain by the time it gets to this approval group.
Common uses of this include the housing sector, which have strict requirements on having 2 approvers per request for certain items. With Approvers Count set to be equal to or less than 2 for every group in the chain, you can ensure that once an item has had 2 approvers then no other users are required.
Requestor ID
If dealing with recurring items from certain users, the Requestor ID criteria can be applied if you know the Compleat username of the requestor.
Supplier Code
You can use the Supplier Code field if you want your group to be contacted if a specific supplier is used for a transaction. If you want to use this field, we recommend you use the supplier codes from your finance system.
Using 'in-range' on coding fields
There are a number of fields available in Advanced Criteria that will allow the filtering of codes within a range of values. The example below displays a range of values that will be applied to the approval group and applying the 'Test field' as Search for a ranging of values (IN-RANGE).
In the example, any transaction with an Expense Account code ranging between the values in the 'Start' field will contact the group.
This method can also be applied on the Account Code and Supplier Code fields for a similar criteria.