When the approvals workflow is enabled, users with the Authorising Manager role may receive requests to review expenses claims from other users. You can read more about how this is works here. If you have the appropriate role, then when logged into RIPA Expenses you'll see an "Approvals" entry in the sidebar menu:
If you click on this you'll see a list of whichever expenses need review. It might look something like this:
Quick actions
You can see a high-level summary of what the expense relates to from this screen. If this is sufficient to decide on the review outcome, you can use the quick action buttons on the right to approve (the "tick"), decline (the "cross") or make a comment on (the "speech bubble") the claim. The comment option pops up a type-in area so that you can write a message that the claimant will see:
This is usually needed when you might, for example, require clarification about the reason for the claim before you can decide on a review outcome, or you might want a change to something like the assigned GL code. When you request changes in this way, the claimant is notified that they have an expense which needs their attention; when they view it, they'll see the message you wrote.
There is a similar process for declining a claim. You need to give a reason for refusing the claim, else it can be quite distressing for the claimant! When you click on the "cross" button, a popup asks for the reason:
The "tick" quick action button to approve a claim doesn't ask for a reason why the action is taken - approval happens as soon as you click on it. If you decide that you want to include a comment with your approval, or if the list of claims doesn't given enough information to make a decision, you can use the detail view.
Detail view
If the overview of a claim is not enough to review it, or if you want to provide a reason for an "approve" or "decline" action, click anywhere around the middle of the row displaying the claim of interest to access the claim's detail view:
The appearance of this can vary widely from claim to claim. For example, much of the time, you will see a receipt image or PDF file displayed on the right and the "Currency" drop-down menu may or may not be present, but is not part of the review process anyway. The important area as at the bottom left. Here, you have three buttons to, once again, approve, decline or make a request related to the expense. In each case, type in a reason in the area above the buttons first.
Bulk approval
The overview page includes a series of small check boxes on the left. There's one in the table header row and one for each listed claim.
Checking a box in a row for a particular claim selects that claim; you can select several individual claims to approve them if you want. Alternatively, the checkbox at the top - next to the "Name" header - toggles the selection or deselection of all the claims in this page of the view only. As the "Prev / Next" buttons at the bottom right indicate, large numbers of claims awaiting review are split across multiple pages - only the claims in the page you can currently see can be bulk-approved.
As soon as at least one claim is selected in this manner, you will see a new button appear:
Clicking on "Approve selected" does what you would expect, approving all of the selected claims without any additional reason being specified.
It is not possible to bulk-decline claims, or to request changes to multiple claims at once.