Forwarding expense forms to additional approvers

Depending on your administrator’s settings for an expense form, you may be able to forward it to one or more additional approvers. e-xpense notifies the additional approver via email. Although this is similar to delegating your approval authority, in that you can assign approval to someone else, it differs in the following, significant ways.

• Delegating means you share your approval authority for all forms that you are responsible for, but when forwarding you assign authority for only one specific pre-authorization request or expense report.

• You can delegate for a limited period of time, whereas forwarding is permanent unless the approver sends the form back to you.

• When you forward to additional approvers, both you and anyone you forward to must approve the form in order to fulfill the approval requirement for the form. For example, if you are the employee’s manager, and the form requires your approval before it can be considered fully approved, then approval by you and everyone you forward to is necessary to fulfill the approval requirement for the manager.

Here is an example of a situation where you would forward e-xpense approval. An employee submits a report for expenses incurred while taking classes. This includes a business class, which you do not have authority to approve, so you forward the report to the CEO or CFO of your company. You still, however, need to approve the report in order to sign off on all the other expenses that you do have authority to approve.

Follow the instructions below to forward an expense form.

To forward an expense form to an additional approver

1. Follow the steps for retrieving and opening an expense form for approval.

2. From the View Pre-Authorization Request or View Expense Report screen, click Forward Approval. The Approval Forwarding Information screen appears.

3. In the Approver field, enter the approver who you want to forward to. You can click to the right of the field to look up the approver.

4. In the Explanation field, enter an explanation for the additional approver to read. Describe your reasons for forwarding the expense form.

5. Click Forward Approval to save the forward. A message confirms that you successfully forwarded the expense form to an additional approver.
   
   Note: If you selected an approver who is already authorized to approve this expense form, an error message informs you that you must select a different approver.

6. If necessary, you can forward to more than one additional approver. To do this, repeat steps 3 through 5 to send to another, additional approver. Or if you are done forwarding, click Close to return to the View Pre-Authorization Request or View Expense Report screen.

If you go back to the Approve Pre-Authorization Request or Approve Expense Report screen, note that the request or report that you forwarded still appears in the list. Both you and the approver you forwarded to are now required to approve the form to change the approval status from pending to approved.

Hint: Once you forward a request or report, you can go to the Approval Forwarding Information screen to monitor the status of the forward. The Approval Result column either shows the approval status (pending, approved, or rejected) of the expense form for the approver, or indicates that the approver sent the expense form back to you. Keep in mind that you cannot change an approver you have forwarded to once you have saved the record.