Approval Workflow Changes

[AshleyJRSCI]

Our company uses the basic Concur system.  Our current Approval Workflow has expense reports moving along to the next manager approver like this...

1. Employee 
2. Employee's Manager
3. Employee's Manager's Manager
4. VP of Ops (manager of Approver #3)
5. President
6. CFO
7. Back to President
8. Back to CFO
9. etc

I'm being asked to remove my President from this workflow.  So my questions are...

1.  Is this possible?
2.  If so, how do I make that change?

[KevinD]

@AshleyJRSCI okay, I saw the case you submitted to our Support team and now it makes sense to me. You didn't mention that the workflow listed is how the reports auto-escalate after three days. So, a couple of things. 

1. If you want to remove the President from the workflow altogether, be sure the President isn't assigned as anyone's approver. It is really easy to do. There are two ways: 1. Go into each profile where the President is assigned and change the approver to someone else. Likely the CFO. If there aren't that many people who have the President assigned, this wouldn't take too long. 2. If you have several people with the President Assigned, you can go to the User Account screen, then click Add Users. Select From Spreadsheet. On the next screen you will see three boxes. The first one is where you can download a spreadsheet of your current users. You want to do this. After it is downloaded, open it up. Look for the Expense Approver Employee ID column. Update the Employee ID in this column for each person who needs to have the President removed. Enter the Employee ID of the new approver. Once completed, save the file. Then go back to the screen where you downloaded the Spreadsheet. In the third box, click Import. Find the Spreadsheet you just updated and click Open to load it back in to your site. This will update the profiles accordingly. 

From what you requested in the Support case, I can tell you that there isn't an option to change the number of days to a certain date. You can only increase the number of days before it auto-escalates. I would suggest increasing this. I've seen other companies go up to around 10 days. Approvers do receive email reminders for approvals, so they hopefully won't miss too many approvals. The approval email reminder is triggered once the report sits in their queue for three days and should then be triggered everyday (excluding weekends) until it is approved. 

Let me know if this answers your question/solves your issue. 🙂