Approvals

One of the most important steps in the reserves reconciliation workflow is the approval of changes, certifying the reasons why an organization's reserves have changed. The approval must be done at the appropriate authority level, and there is an audit record of who approved a change, when and why.

Important: The approval process is configured in Reserves Configuration (see Configure the approval process). This means that every company will have its own set of approval stages, called states. This topic shows the states which are configured for the default approval process.

Approvals are managed in the Approvals tab of each reconciliation. When you select this tab, the buttons in the Approvals tab on the ribbon will become active (see Ribbon). Changes are approved for individual hierarchy nodes within a reconciliation; the screenshot below shows an example (based on the default approval configuration) with several nodes in various states. (Note: You can filter displayed items by using the column filters ).

The states shown in the example are as follows:

• Draft: The initial state; changes have been made but not yet submitted for approval. This state is assigned regardless of the nature of the change, be it manual editing, loading of data or automatic classification.
• Pending: The changes have been submitted for approval. They need to be reviewed and approved or rejected.
• Approved by Manager: The changes have been accepted by the first approver.
• Approved: The changes have been accepted by the last approver. The node is now locked and no further changes can be made.
• Rejected: The change has not been accepted by the approver. The submitter needs to review and re-submit it.

The table below describes the columns which appear in the Approvals tab.

Column	Description
State	Current state of the node (see above).
Node	Node where the changes were made.
Last Updated	Time of the last change of the approval state.
Last Updated By	Name of the user who performed the last operation.
Submitted By	Name of the user who submitted the changes.
Last Comment	Comments entered when the changes were submitted, approved or rejected.
History	Click this button to view the full history of approvals for the selected node.