How do I speed up the approval process?

[MeggieC]

The "Top 10 Longest to Approve" report provides a rank of the longest time to approve expense reports or invoices and includes approver and employee names. Target approvers on this list with details about how the Concur mobile app can be used to approve expense reports and invoices. Find in the Expense Processing* or Invoice folders.

[tjbmoreno]

We have a five-day time out.  After that, the expense report gets escalated to the next level approver.  They don't like that.  More often than not, it gets sent back and the initial approver gets a talking to from the higher level approver.  That works very well!

[KevinD]

Another option other than the great one Terri mentioned, is to use the Email Reminders in SAP Concur. You can set them up to send out emails whenever you'd like. So, if you want to remind approvers to get their reports approved, tell the system to send an email reminder (by the way, this reminder is already set up, but you can shorten the amount of time). It can be set up to send, even let's say, after the report has been sitting in the approver's queue for one day. Unfortunately, the aren't too many options for speeding up the process since the approvers have to go in and do the work. Other than reminding them or using the auto-escalate option, it is up to the approvers to do it. Other options are looking at how many approvals you have setup in your workflow. Some companies require multiple approvals. I don't know if that is the case with your company, but if it is, you could have an internal discussion to see if all those approvals are absolutely necessary. I hope this helps.

[Josh]

Hi @KevinD,

And is that Email Reminders feature only available in Concur Professional? If not, where would a Standard-er like myself find those settings? Thanks!

[KevinD]

@JoshUnfortunately this feature is for Professional customers only. However, I do have a an althernate solution that could work, but this would depend on whether you have the Cognos Business Intelligence offering or the buy-up version of our newer Analytics platform. If you want to send me a PM with your company name, I can look up your company and let you know if my solution would work or not.

[Josh]

Hi @KevinD,

Bummer haha and no worries - just thought I'd ask! We currently do not have Business Intelligence, nor the newer Analytics platofrm, only the standard Analysis.

This is not mission-critical, either; I just wanted to see if it was just a disabled-by-default feature like Custom Audit Rules. I'm always looking to improve our processes if we can, but we have things in place that essentially serve this function currently.

Thanks for the offer, though!

[tjbmoreno]

Another option is to reverse your workflow. We have our reports go to the processor first and then to the Approver. This helps if there are corrections to be made, as they don’t get caught in a circle requiring multiple approvals from the same Approver.