Approver Flow
Written by Michelle Henley
Updated at April 3rd, 2024
Table of Contents
An approver is a user who is responsible for reviewing the requests that are submitted for their review and then take an action on them. Approvers have the ability to approve, reject, or request additonal information for a request. Each approver must complete their assigned approval step before the request can proceed. The specific order of approvers is called the Approver Flow and is pre-defined by an organization during the onboarding process.
For example:
Approval 1 - Compliance
Approval 2 - Manager
Approval 3 - Legal
Approval 4 - CCO
When deciding on your organization's Approver Flow you may consider the following:
- Approver Flows can have as many or as few approvers as you need
- Approver Flows can be different for each request type
- Approvers can be triggered based on things such as screening results, risk scores, support limits and more
Click here for more information on an Approval Flow and how it works once it's configured.
Please note the following:
Not all conditions below can be combined together for a single approver group. Final configuration on the approval group will be provided by our Implementation Team after reviewing the first draft of the approval workflow and consulting with our Engineering Team.
All tenant configurations are implemented in our “back-end” by Lextegrity’s Onboarding Engineers. As a result, once implemented your configurations cannot easily be modified. In order to avoid onboarding delays, please involve all internal stakeholders and take your time when making configuration decisions.
1. Approvers by Request Type
The system allows for different approver flows for different request types and will automatically assign specific approver group(s) accordingly.
For example:
- Marketing and Legal Approvers are triggered for Sponsorships & Donations requests
- Legal and Compliance Approvers are triggered for Requests to accept Gifts, Travel, or Hospitality
2. Assigning Approvers
Approvers can be included in the Approver Flow in the following ways:
-
Mapped to the system as approver through the HR files provided by your organization
- Auto-Assign Manager - allows you to leverage your HR data so that the system will automatically assign the submitter’s manager as an approver
- Mapped to an approver group, requests are pre-filled with the approver upon submission
- Assigned to an approver group, submitters can choose an approver from the assigned users upon submission of the request
3. Number of Approvers
Approver flows can have as many (or as few) approvers as is needed to suit your business needs.
- Requests with no approver requirement are saved to the system with a Recorded status.
4. Types of Approvers
In order to enable more dynamic and faster approvals, separate approval processes for the activity and consultants can be configured. For example, if the activity and 5 out of 6 HCPs are approved, the 6th HCP can remain under review. This means the business can start contracting and other logistics without compliance being a bottlenecked by the 6th HCP.
| Reviewer | Only reviews the request before approving it to move to the next approver. This configuration allows you to assign a user as a quasi approver for visibility/awareness purposes. With this enabled the “Reviewer” cannot enter a formal approval (or rejection). Rather, this user is only responsible for reviewing the request. The review step will be stored in the audit trail/request history. |
| Activity Only Approver | Only approves the activity. |
| Recipient Only Approver | Only approves the recipient(s). |
| Activity & Recipient Approver | Approves both the activity and the recipient(s). |
Note: Activity must always be approved in current step before the recipient(s) can be approved.
5. Approver Privileges
Any of the privileges listed below can also be assigned to one or more approvers within the workflow. By assigning these privileges you can further customize the workflow to suit your organization's business needs.
Note: Assigning a privilege to an approver gives them the ability in all requests they are assigned to approve.
| Privilege Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Adjust Engagement Risk Score | Gives user capability to adjust risk score assigned to a Third-Party engagement. |
| Adjust Expiration Date | Gives approver ability to adjust expiration period while approving requests with an auto-calculated expiration period. |
| Edit EDD | Gives user capability to order new EDD reports, view past reports, and upload reports. |
| Resolve Screening | User is able to view screening results, screening history, and resolve screening results. |
| Send DDQ | Gives user capability to send DDQ to a Third-Party. |
6. Conditional Approval Groups
Conditional Approval Groups can be configured into your workflow to either add additonal approver(s) based on the specified criteria, or remove approver(s).
For example the following configurations to add approvers are possible:
- Add Approvers based on Overall Risk Score
- Trigger different manager approver in cases where the Business Owner is not the submitter
- Trigger different approver(s) based on answered from the request questionnaire such as:
- Additonal approver for recipient type, such as government officials
- Cross-Border approver based on submitter location, request location. and/or recipient location
- Additional approver for support limits or aggregate limits
Removing/Skipping approvers
- Our System provides the flexibility to “skip” certain approval steps for lower risk requests. The skipped step will be stored as a “recorded” (rather than, for example, “approved”) step in the audit trail/request history.
7. Restart Flow if Updated
Approvers have the ability to request for more information from the submitter on the activity and/or on individual consultants during the approval process. In such instances, the activity or recipient needs to be re-submitted by the submitter after the updates have been made. Depending on the approval workflow configuration, the request will go back to the same approver for review or the approval workflow can be initiated from the beginning.
This configuration is used to ensure that approvers review updates that are made to submitted requests. With this enabled, if the request is updated after submission, all approvals entered prior to the update will be overwritten and all approvers will be required to approve the request again.
Things to Note