With Document Approval Workflow, employee roles such as Line Manager, Head of Department and Head of Branch as well as Custom Roles (e.g. Boss, Payroll Manager, COO etc) have been added to support a complete Document 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 document transactions, you should try to minimize the use of Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc) to process document transactions.
In addition, an important Document Approval Workflow History feature 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 document transaction approval process.
Use Custom Fields to capture user-defined data
Setting up Document Approval Workflow
To enable full document approval workflow support, you have to set it up first via Document Workflow ❯ Approval Workflow.
You could now add a new workflow and give it a proper name. The workflow Code will be shown in the subject line of email notifications.
You are presented with 3 Approver levels, from 1st Approver to 3rd Approver. The first approver is mandatory while the rest of them are optional. However, 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 review the document transactions at 1st and 3rd stage of the document workflow respectively.
Reducing Document Approval Workflow levels while there are some document transactions (such as Timesheet) which have completed initial approvals but still pending final approvals, will reset these document transactions back to first approval level. For instance, changing from 3 levels of approval to 1 level will reset the approval level of document transactions that have completed the 1st and 2nd levels.
Document transactions associated with inactive Document Approval Workflow will not show up in the Document Workflow ❯ Review for review.
Using Document Review
If an employee happens to be an Approver (a Line Manager to some other employees, or as a Head of Department or Head of Branch), then he/ she would be able to review the document transactions (such as Timesheet) by other employees who are connected to his/ her supervisory roles. For instance, as a Head of Deprtment, an employee will be able to review the document transactions of other employees who are within the same department.
Managing Document 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, Payroll Manager, 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 an approving officer, if you reject a document transaction (such as Timesheet), the document transaction will be concluded as Rejected immediately, regardless of whether there are further stages in the entire workflow. However, if you approve current document transaction, whether the document transaction is concluded as Approved depends on how the workflow is set up:
If there is no further workflow stage after current stage, then current document transaction will be concluded as Approved.
If there are additional workflow stage(s) after current approval, then current document transaction is not concluded yet but it will be routed to the next approval level.
A document transaction is concluded as Approved only if it goes through the entire workflow without being rejected at any stage.
Just like approving/ rejecting document transactions using Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc), as an approving officer, you may leave a Document Approval Remark to explain why a document transaction is approved/ rejected.
When a document transaction appears in the Document Review, the factors that determine if current document transaction is removed from your view after you process it (by approving or rejecting it) are:
Your supervisory roles and how the roles are set up in Document Approval Workflow
Current workflow stage of the document transaction
Let's say you are both the Line Manager of an employee and the Head of Department for the same employee. If the Document 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 document transaction 2 times (or reject it once) before it is removed from your Document 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 document transactions as Employer.
Employer roles' approvals will also be logged as part of the workflow history. Changing the document transaction status will cause the pertinent change to be logged, including Escalating the document transaction to the next workflow stage.
Administering Document Transaction by Employer Roles
Besides approving/ rejecting document transactions, Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc) are empowered to Escalate, Cancel or Reset a document workflow. HR.my Administrator is able to Escalate a pending document transaction from current workflow stage to the next. Escalation happens for various possible use cases, such as when approving officer is not available, unassigned, or takes too long to decide etc.
Document transactions (either approved or still pending review) may also be Cancelled by HR.my Administrator if the applicants would like to withdraw their document transactions.
In addition, if for whatever reason you would like the document transaction to go back to the beginning stage of document approval workflow, you may Reset it to Pending Approval.
Resetting document transaction status will also reset it's associated workflow back to the beginning stage. Resetting could be caused either by changing the document approval status (from Approved or Rejected or Cancelled to Pending Approval), or by reducing the stages of current Document Approval Workflow (which only affects document transactions that are pending for final approval, but have already completed some initial workflow stages).
About Document Approval Workflow History
All possible actions that any of the approving officers or Employer roles (e.g. HR.my Administrator etc) perform on the document transactions will be tracked in the Approval Workflow History tab.
In addition, you may also find out from current document transaction's workflow history whose approval is needed for the current workflow stage.
