Expense Approver can sometimes edit business purpose and sometimes cannot

[trussel]

I have an expense approver who sometimes can edit the Business Purpose for transactions on expense reports submitted for their approval and sometimes cannot.  Does anyone know what causes this?  The editable entries have the "red bar" at the left of the field and the non-editable ones do not.  Any information is much appreciated.

[KevinD]

@trussel without seeing your site configuration to say for sure, I can tell you that the site can be configured to disallow certain fields for certain expense types. Each expense type entry added to a report uses what we call a Form. The fields on these forms can be set to Read Only for approvers. So, it is possible that for the selected expense type, the Business Purpose fields was set to Read Only for approvers. 

Not all expense types share the same form, so some forms get configured differently than others, where for one expense type Business Purpose might be required for the user, but a different expense type not have Business Purpose required. Same with approvers, Business Purpose might be an editable field for some expense types and locked for others.