Invoice Approval Processes
Setting up a new invoice approval process
If the default approval process needs to be expanded for your organization, this can be done via the ‘Invoice Approval Processes’ button in the Administration menu. Click this button to see which processes are present and to add a new process. The ‘Invoice Approval Processes’ screen shows the present processes, based on the customer cluster for which they are configured. The default approval process is configured for the ‘All Customers’ customer cluster and more specific clusters take precedent. This means that you can add a new approval process for (e.g.) a country or region based customer cluster, which overrules the default approval process that is configured for All Customers. A customer cluster cannot have more than one invoice approval process. Therefore, if you want a new process to apply to all customers you should change the default process.
Adding a new Invoice Approval Process
You can add a new approval process by clicking the ‘Add Process’ button on the top right corner of your screen. This will open the ‘Create Invoice Approval Process’ screen, which allows you to set a Customer Cluster for this process. Below the selected customer cluster, the default steps of the approval process are present. Step 0 (requesting approval) and step 1 (approving the invoice) form the basis of your new process. You can add a new step to the process by clicking the ‘+ Add Step’ button. This will add a step to the process, for which you will need to set a specific user group. Make sure to select a suitable user group for the step you’re adding to the new processs: the user that needs to execute this approval needs to be in this user group. See the CloudBilling docs on Security to read about the user groups.
User Groups
As described above, user groups determine which users can request approval and/or approve invoices. Any user in a user group with invoice approval permission can request approval. This permission can be granted by checking the ‘Approve’ checkbox in the ‘Invoices’ section of the User Group permission settings. However, to approve the invoice a user needs to be in a User Group that has been asigned to the appropriate stage of the invoice approval process. You may want to update or alter your user groups to better reflect the stages of the process.
Notification
Email notifications are active by default for each new step in the approval process. When this option is activated, an email will be sent to the users who are in the user group in this step of the process. The users will get an email notification which states that their approval is requested for a number of invoices. The email addresses of the CloudBilling users are used for this email notification. You can deactivate the email notifications by unchecking the box under ‘Notify’.
Changing a process
After selecting a process, you can change the process by deleting or adding steps, or changing the order of steps via the buttons on the right side of your screen. Redundant processes can be deleted.