Preparing your invoice approval workflows before implementation

The workflow functionality in Process Director facilitates the invoice approval process in your organization and allows you to track document traffic. In a manual approval process, your documents fly from one department to another, and the final “Thumbs up” from the approver is usually the result of a long journey.

Before implementing approval workflows, we suggest setting up a meeting with your Accounts Payable Department to discuss the current process. In most of the cases, there is no written policy and the criteria for assigning an invoice to a specific person for approval, are based on human perspective or common sense, rather than a standard procedure.

Reserve a meeting room, get some coffee and make sure to discuss the following topics:

Define the scope

Which invoices categories do you want to implement in the approval process? (Services, Travel, IT, HR, etc.)
How many approval processes are actually in place for these invoices? Define them one by one.

Define the criteria behind

The criteria for each approval process:

1. List the rules and the exceptions.
2. Specify whether it are subjective (based on human perspective) or objective (based on the content of the invoice) criteria.

Are there any required sequences or dependencies in the process? Example: the invoice must be approved by person-A before it is sent to person-B.
Are there constraints or special conditions for every approval?

List the people involved

Who are the people involved in each invoice approval process? Also list any exceptions, i.e. the occasional approvers in special cases.
Will all these people have access to ReadSoft?

Determine the level of automation

Is it possible to start each approval process based on the captured invoice data?

Summarize this information in in a report, because it will be your blueprint to start the configuration in ReadSoft. The answers to the questions above are the pieces you need in order to complete the puzzle.

Configuration elements:

• The scope is the combination of the workflows and their potential steps.
• The criteria are the conditions to be evaluated at workflow and/or step level.
• The people are the users, roles or groups to be created in RSO.
• The automation: the possibility to start the workflow automatically or by user intervention.

In case of questions or special cases, do not hesitate to contact us via our support team or your account manager.