SAP Knowledge Base Article - Public

2856410 - Expense Report Approval for Top Manager

Symptom

There are unassigned approval tasks for expense reports appearing for the key user in the Business Task Management view of the Application and User Management work center.

This expense report belongs to the CEO of the company.

Image/data in this KBA is from SAP internal systems, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental.

Environment

SAP Business ByDesign

Reproducing the Issue

  1. The CEO of the company creates an expense report
  2. You notice the Expense Report approval task is not assigned to any employee 

Cause

In Application and User Management you can see the Default approval process for Expense Report: Default Line Manager of Employee.

As a consequence, the approver determination for expense reports sent by the CEO (an approver who is at top of the hierarchy) does not return any approver.

Resolution

Due to segregation of duties, an employee may not be the manager of himself. 
Therefore accessing the organisational structure will not give an answer to the question who will be the approver of a top manager.
This means that for the top manager(s) you need to define a rule, what should happen if a manager is not found.

  1. Define additional approval step for CEO in approval processes for Expense Reports.
  2. Go to the Application and User Management work center. 
  3. Go to the Task Distribution > Approval Processes view
  4. Select the active version of Default Approval Process for Expense Report.
  5. Copy this Approval Process.
  6. In the copy press "Add Row" in order to add a new  Process Step CEO Approval also with Step No 1.
  7. Under "Work Distribution" select "Direct Approver" and Press Edit in order to select the Employee responsible for Approval of CEO’s expense reports.
  8. Then go to "Conditions" and  press "Add a Group" and enter a condition for the Employee Id of the CEO.

VIV on your pc.jpg

kba1.jpg

  1. Finally it should look like as follows:

kba2.jpg

  1. Save and Close the approval process definition.

Keywords

Approval Expense Report; Manager Approval, Geschaeftsfuehrer , KBA , AP-ERM , Expense and Reimbursement Management , SRD-FIN-ERM , Travel and Expense Management , How To

Product

SAP Business ByDesign all versions