RSMUS.comThe Advanced Approvals SuiteSolutions is a great module to utilize if you are looking to address common approval requirements across multiple transaction types such as Purchase Requisitions, Purchase Orders, Vendor Bills, Sales Orders, Expense Reports and Journal Entries.
Advanced Approvals allows custom rules to be created for each transaction type and these rules can apply to all subsidiaries or just one subsidiary. There can also be multiple rules for a single transaction type, this allows a sequence of rules to be executed. Multi-currency is supported as well and allows currency conversion to take place during the approval rules evaluation if the transaction currency is different from the base currency.
Email notifications and approval/rejection is one of my favorite features of this module. The Advanced Approval module automatically sends email notifications to the next approver when the approval is in their queue as well as the creator/requestor of the transaction when it is rejected or after final approval. A feature that clients I have worked with enjoy is that the approver can approve or reject the transaction via the email, without signing into NetSuite.
There are a plethora of different ways to structure who will be assigned as the approver of a transaction. The different types are listed below with a brief description.
Approver Types:
- Employee Hierarchy– Transactions would be approved by the supervisor of the creator/requestor. This is different from the supervisor approver type as Employee Hierarchy will continue up the chain of command. For example, Employee A submits the transactions employee A’s supervisor, B, would approve the transactions. Then employee B’s supervisor, C, would approve the transaction. The process would continue up the hierarchy until the approver as the required threshold to approve the transaction.
- Parallel Approval– This should be utilized when multiple approvers are required to approve a transaction in a single approval rule. There are two options for this which are Line approvers and List approvers.
- Line Approvers-Approvers are identified based online level information, however, approval/rejection is for the entire transaction
- List Approvers– A list of users that must approve first before going to the next rule.
- Department Approver– The chair of the department will be responsible for approving the transaction.
- Supervisor-The supervisor of the creator/requestor would approve.
- Role– Set the approver to a certain role such as CEO. Anyone with that role in NetSuite could approve the transaction.
- Employee– A specific employee can be listed as the approver.
- Dynamic Rule– This is utilized when the other Approver Types will not work. For example when the Approver is based on Class, Location, Category or Custom Field.
- Super Approver– This is able to bypass the approval process. This allows one employee to push transactions to Approved status without going through the approval sequence.
Approval Delegation is supported in the Advanced Approval module. This means when an approver is out-of-office they can delegate their approvals to another employee.
3 Way Vendor Bill Matching allows Vendor Bills to be created from approved Purchase Orders and automatically set their status to approved if the amounts are within the set PO to VB amount/percentage tolerance. This is an excellent feature that will eliminate approvers having to approve a VB for a PO they already approved.
Overall, the Advanced Approval SuiteSolution module has a lot of great features and can assist in implementing or improving an approval process for a variety of transactions.
For more information on this topic or others related to NetSuite, contact RSM at netsuite@rsmus.com or by phone at 855.437.7202.
