Claim Approval Workflow (e-Claim)

1. Overview
   • For a typical use case of Claim Approval Workflow, please check out the example in e-Claim (Paperless Expense Claim Management).
   • With Claim Approval Workflow, employee roles such as Line Manager, Head of Department and Head of Branch as well as Custom Roles (e.g. Boss, HR for Claim Review, COO etc) have been added to support a complete Claim Approval Workflow with minimum intervention from Employer roles (such as HR.my Administrator, HR.my Manager or HR Role).
   • Other than some very special occasions such as performing workflow escalation for claim applications, you should try to minimize the use of Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc) to process expense claims.
   • In addition, an important Claim Approval Workflow History has been added to trace the status of various workflow stages, including changes performed by Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc) and to provide a full audit trail to each claim application approval process.
2. Setting up Claim Approval Workflow
   • To enable full claim approval workflow support, you have to set it up first via Expense Claim ❯ Approval Workflow.
   • You are now presented with 3 Approver levels, from 1st Approver to 3rd Approver. If you are setting up the DEFAULT approval workflow, then these 3 approvers are optional. However, for non-DEFAULT approval workflow, at least the 1st Approver must be assigned. In the meantime, you have to set up a lower level approver first before assigning one for higher level.
   • You may also repeat the roles in different levels, say 1st Approver being Line Manager, 2nd Approver being Head of Department and 3rd Approver being Line Manager again. This kind of set up will require the employee Line Manager to approve the expense claim application at 1st and 3rd stage of the claim application workflow respectively.
   • Reducing Claim Approval Workflow levels while there are some expense claims which have completed initial approvals but still pending final approvals, will reset these expense claims back to first approval level. For instance, changing from 3 levels of approval to 1 level will reset the approval level of expense claims that have completed the 1st and 2nd levels.
3. Multiple Claim Approval Workflow
   • By default, each Employer will be set up with a single Default Claim Approval Workflow. This is usually sufficient for most organizations.
   • All Expense Types by default will also be assigned to the Default Claim Approval Workflow.
   • If your organization requires more than one Claim Approval Workflow, you may enable Multiple Claim Approval Workflow Scheme via Expense Claim ❯ Approval Workflow, by clicking at the link in the Multiple Scheme section.
   • A typical use case that may warrant more than one Claim Approval Workflow is to support different approval workflow for different types of expense claims, e.g.
     • "Mileage" claims require 2 levels of approval by Line Manager and Head of Department
     • "Business Travel" claims that require 3 levels of approval by Line Manager, Head of Department and Boss
   • When Multiple Claim Approval Workflow Scheme is enabled, you could add new Claim Approval Workflow as you would other modules. Click at the "Cancel" button to flip to Query view, then click at the "New" button to create a new workflow.
   • Once you have set up additional Claim Approval Workflow, you may go to Expense Claim ❯ Expense Type to assign the relevant workflow to Expense Type. In Expense Type, you will notice that there is an Approval Workflow combo box with "DEFAULT" text. This indicates that current Expense Type is assigned with the Default Claim Approval Workflow. If you accidentally assign an Expense Type to another workflow, you may simply click at the "Clear" button to re-assign the Expense Type with the Default Claim Approval Workflow.
   Expense claim transactions associated with inactive Claim Approval Workflow will not show up in the Expense Claim ❯ Review for review.
4. Managing Claim Approval
   • Using Employee Roles
     • Besides the 3 system roles for approving officers, i.e. Line Manager, Head of Department and Head of Branch, you may also create your own Custom Roles for designated roles, such as Boss, HR for Claim Review, COO etc. The 3 system roles usually vary among employees (as employees may have different Line Manager or Head of Department), but the Custom Roles will always remain the same for all employees (such as CEO or Boss).
       Line Manager is assigned via Employee ❯ Placement
       Head of Department is assigned via Employer ❯ Department
       Head of Branch is assigned via Employer ❯ Branch
       Custom Role is assigned via Employee ❯ Custom Role
     • As a claim approving officer, if you reject a claim application, the claim application will be concluded as Rejected immediately, regardless of whether there are further stages in the entire workflow. However, if you approve current claim application, whether the claim application is concluded as Approved depends on how the workflow is set up:
       • If there is no further workflow stage after current stage, then current claim application will be concluded as Approved.
       • If there are additional workflow stage(s) after current approval, then current claim application is not concluded yet but it will be routed to the next approval level.
       • A claim application is concluded as Approved only if it goes through the entire workflow without being rejected at any stage.
       • Just like approving/ rejecting claim applications using Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc), as a claim approving officer, you may leave a Claim Approval Remark to explain why an expense claim is approved/ rejected.
     • When a claim application appears in the Claim Review, the factors that determine if current claim application is removed from your view after you process it (by approving or rejecting it) are:
       1. Your supervisory roles and how the roles are set up in Claim Approval Workflow
       2. Current workflow stage of the claim application
       Let's say you are both the Line Manager of an employee and the Head of Department for the same employee. If the Claim Approval Workflow is set up so that 1st Approver will be the Line Manager and 2nd Approver will be the Head of Department, then you will need to approve the claim application 2 times (or reject it once) before it is removed from your Claim Review view.
   • Using Employer Roles
     • When you are managing via Employer account as Employer roles (such as HR.my Administrator, HR.my Manager or HR Role), you are approving/ rejecting expense claim applications as Employer.
     • Employer roles' approvals will be logged as part of the workflow history. Changing the claim application status will cause the pertinent change to be logged, including Escalating the claim application to the next workflow stage.
5. Administering Expense Claim Application by Employer Roles
   • Besides approving/ rejecting expense claim applications, Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc) are empowered to Escalate or Reset a claim application workflow. HR.my Administrator is able to Escalate a pending claim application from current workflow stage to the next. Escalation happens for various possible use cases, such as expense claim approving officer is not available, unassigned, or takes too long to decide etc.
   • In addition, if for whatever reason you would like the expense claim application to go back to the beginning stage of claim approval workflow, you may Reset it to Pending Approval.
   • Resetting claim status will also reset it's associated workflow back to the beginning stage. Resetting could be caused either by changing the claim approval status (from Approved or Rejected to Pending Approval), or by reducing the stages of current Claim Approval Workflow (which only affects claims that are pending for final approval, but have already completed some initial workflow stages).
6. About Claim Approval Workflow History
   • All possible actions that any of the expense claim approving officers or Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc) perform on the claim applications will be tracked in the Approval Workflow History tab.
   • In addition, you may also find out from current claim application's workflow history whose approval is needed for the current workflow stage.