Greater Compliance, Quality and Control with BOS’s Approvals Functionality

In BOS, Approvals functionality ensures that the right information is sent to the right person at the right time. This is useful for quotations or purchase orders, or anything in a transaction or workflow that needs managerial or supervisory approval before moving on to the next stage in the business cycle.

The benefits of Approvals functionality:

• Reduces risk
• Creates or updates mitigation controls
• Reduces the cost and effort of managing compliance
• Eases time-consuming manual tasks and improves productivity
• Reduces penalties for compliance violations
• Improves quality of service
• Reduces errors and delays

Approvals can be managed in several ways in BOS. They are either Actions or Checklists, or both.

Approvals with Actions

Actions are predetermined instructions that force the application to perform certain tasks, such as Approvals. Each Action can include several steps or checks for validation, such as carry out quality control tests on the transaction’s data, check value-limits alloted to the user, or limit approval of a transaction to a certain User Role hierarchy.

Benefits

• Simple and elegant setup: one procedure is used to set up any approvals for any database
• Fully audited approvals for improved transparency and accountability
• User-friendly: one-click approval, based on security clearance and inbuilt criteria
• System-driven validation and tests ensure a high standard of operations throughout the business

Features

• Approval limits can be set against whatever the business determines as a threshold that would require managerial approval, such as a monetary value based for Quotations, Purchase Orders or Sales Orders, or for a User ID, or certain Items.
• Actions can have several built-in responses:
  • Errors prevent users from continuing, based on desired operations parameters
  • Warnings advise users to check possible errors, and proceed with caution, however these can be overridden
  • Confirmation of approval moves the transaction along the business cycle, changes the status of a transaction, allows for an output, or whatever action the Approval triggers
• Every Action is fully audited for security and quality control.
• Actions can be cancelled.

Approvals with Checklists

Checklists provide another way for Approvals to be carried out. Many times, several criteria first need to be met before a transaction can progress to the next cycle in the business. Checklist functionality allows for this.

Benefits

• Quick, easy setup
• Single place of origin - Removes duplication error and effort to edit or update
• Greater quality and control - Transactions can only move to the next status if each of the items on the checklist is met. If not, it will return a warning or an error, halting progress.
• Functionality allows for a tighter system that ensures policies are met and standards are high at all times, with every user.

Features

• One checklist can be linked to many transactions, as checklists are not intrinsically linked to any module or transaction; they are linked in Transaction Settings.
• There is automated as well as manual checklist functionality
  • Automated - If the requisite criteria of the checklist item is met, the item is automatically approved. Eg checking that customer name is added to a transaction, or minimal gross profit per quotation is met.
  • Manual - This requires supervisor’s or manager’s manual approval. Eg checking if the Due Date allocated is realistic, or that the customer’s brief is accurately reflected in the Quote. Notes can be added to these steps for greater communication and accountability.
• A manager can override a checklist parameter, if warranted.
• Approvals can be cancelled
• Audit trail - The supervisor’s name and time of approval are noted with each approval

Approvals with Both: Actions and Checklists

It is typically beneficial to use Checklists as well as Actions with a Limited Checklist type, or role-based approval type. Eg, the Manager’s approval is required when a Quotation is above a certain value, whoever their approval is only possible if the Estimator has also approved it. An Action then runs through the Checklist, using the items on the checklist as the test criteria instead of SQL tests typically used in Actions Approvals.

In Conclusion

BOS Approvals functionality ensures the business runs at a high standard of operations with lower waste and sustainable levels of compliance, checked and managed automatically at every turn, at every juncture, by the system.