Approval Workflows

Approvals control spend before commitment or change.

How Approvals Work

1. A requisition, RFQ supplier award, PO, or change order is submitted.
2. SikaBooks finds the matching approval policy.
3. The policy routes the request through ordered approval steps.
4. Each step is assigned to a role template or specific business user.
5. Rejection stops the request and stores a required comment.

Owners do not bypass approval policy assignment. When an owner submitted the PO and is also assigned to the current step, SikaBooks allows a deliberate self-approval after confirmation and marks the decision as an owner override in the audit trail. Non-owner self-approval remains blocked.

Manual Reminders

• Open Approvals Queue -> Submitted by me to follow approvals you initiated.
• Send reminder notifies only the current authorized approver through in-app notification and queued email.
• Requesters and Buyers can remind their own requests. Procurement Managers and verified owners can remind visible pending Procurement approvals.
• A four-business-hour cooldown prevents repeated reminder noise.
• Sending a reminder does not reset the escalation deadline, approve the document, or grant the sender decision authority.
• Email failure does not change approval status; the in-app notification and delivery ledger remain available for controlled retry.

Automatic SLA and Escalation

Each approval request receives an immutable copy of its policy steps. Later policy edits therefore do not change an approval already in progress.

New steps default to a first reminder after 24 business hours, repeat every 24 business hours, and escalation after 48 business hours. Automation remains off until an administrator selects an eligible escalation target and enables it.

• Notify only warns the escalation target but does not grant decision authority.
• Delegate step transfers authority for the current step to an eligible approver. Later steps remain unchanged.
• Inactive, cross-tenant, unauthorized, or self-approval-conflicting escalation targets are rejected.
• Business hours default to Monday-Friday, 08:00-17:00 in the tenant timezone. Public holidays are not excluded in this release.

Approval Policies

Policies define:

• name
• amount range
• optional department code
• priority
• ordered approval steps
• optional automatic reminder timing
• notify-only or delegated escalation and its eligible target

Create and update policies from Approvals -> Policies.