Manager approval before Back office approval

[LuisCastro]

Hello!

There was a suggestion in our Company to change the workflow of one of our countries.

Currently the workflow is Submission > Manager approval > Cost object approval > Back office approval.

The suggestion was to change the Back office approval as the next step after submission. After back office, then managers will approve.

Has anyone ever tried this or seen this?

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,

Luis Castro

[mhales1]

Hi Luis 

this was a request in our Company and we did change the workflow in the system for the back office to be able to audit first and after the audit team confirmed the report was up to policy then the report was approved and manager would receive for approval. The only trick is that the change was not public because the company still wanted the manager to be responsible for the expenses and if this change was public there was a chance that Managers would not feel the since of responsability that the company wanted. It is a very simple step to do if you have access to the workflow in Expense admin

[KevinD]

@LuisCastro most likely you won't have access to change the workflow. To be able to do this you or someone in your company must have taken our Advanced Configuration class. If you haven't or no one in your company has, then you would have to submit a ticket to SAP Concur Support to have the workflow changed. 

I will agree with @mhales1 that if managers know that the back office has already looked at the report, they may not be as diligent in their review of reports. But, this is something your company will ultimately need to say they are okay with. 

Kevin

[DeanR]

Hi @LuisCastro ,

Below are my comments from this earlier related thread: https://community.concur.com/t5/Concur-Expense-Best-Practices/Concur-Approval-Workflows/m-p/4321

We use the workflow exactly as you've described it and it's working fine for us. 

The AP Processors are reviewing:

• correct Expense Types are selected
• correct receipt status is selected
• necessary receipts are attached and match each expense
• Attendee information is correct

For these items the AP Processors have a better understanding of what is correct than the approving managers do, so it makes sense to arrange the workflow this way.  Previously we had the manager approval first but found that a lot of reports were being sent back by the AP Processors to the employee and the managers would then have to re-approve.  Now the approving managers are only getting 'clean' expense reports to approve.

It's a bit laborious for the AP Processor(s) as we're effectively auditing every single report.  However we're a small organisation, only licensed for 80 expense reports per month, which is rarely exceeded.