Approval roles

Most approval processes are transparent to requesters, who therefore do not need a thorough understanding of Approval Server.

The intended audience for this topic are approvers and process administrators.

The following image shows the different types of users in the approval process and their permissions:

Requesters

Requesters are people who want a request to be approved. Requesters work with an application that starts an approval process by entering an approval request. Approval requests are routed to all required approvers according to the rules of the approval process.

By using Approval Server, requesters can initiate approval requests, check the status of their requests, and respond to More Information requests.

Approvers

Approvers are people who have the authority to approve, reject, reassign, hold, or provide questions and comments for a request in an approval process.

The process administrator configures approvers for each process so that each request has a specified approver list. Different requesters can have different approver lists for the same process.

An approver list specifies the exact list of signatures required for a request. A signature can come from an individual or from a business role containing multiple individuals, such as department managers. You can use Approval Server to create the approver list for each process with any combination of individuals and roles.

Approvers review outstanding requests that are assigned to them and take action on those requests. Approver actions are performed by using Approval Central, which is the Approval Server console. For more information, see Approval-Central.

The actions approvers can take include:

• Approving requests
• Rejecting requests
• Reassigning requests
• Holding requests
• Requesting and responding to More Information Requests
• Checking status of the requests

Approvers have access to the details of the request being processed as well as to the request history. The history includes a list of all approvers who have responded to the request and the actions they took. Also, any comments that have been entered by other approvers are available for review.

If approvers need to obtain more information before approving a request, they can send a More Information request to any Approval Server user.

A More Information request is separate from the approval request but remains associated with it.

Alternate approvers

When an approver is unavailable, the approver can assign an alternate approver who has the same authority within the approval process. An alternate approver is someone who substitutes for the approver and acts with the approver's authority and privileges for a set duration.

Approvers can set up any number of alternate approvers. Each alternate approver can be set up to substitute within one or more approval processes.

Process administrators

A process administrator is a user who has permission to carry out design and administration tasks in Approval Server.

The primary process administrator must be set up by the AR System administrator. However, the other process administrators can be set up by an existing process administrator. 

Process administrators perform the following tasks:

• Design the approval process to generate approval signature data when AR System workflow needs to be authorized.
• Connect the Approval Server forms to workflows to accomplish the designed approval process.
  This action includes configuring routing and creating the list of authorized approvers. For more information, see Adding-approvals-to-an-application.
• Override a process, or parts of a process, when circumstances arise that must be handled outside of the established workflow. For more information, see Overriding-approvals.
• Grant limited authority to specified users, allowing them to configure a process, override a process, or both.
• Designate alternate approvers for any approver.
• Create and delete other process administrators as needed.

Process administrator actions are performed by using the AP:Administration form.

Other process administrators can have full or limited authority. A process administrator with limited authority can perform the following activities:

• Act as an administrator to manage only specific processes that are assigned by a process administrator with full authority.
• Act as an override-only administrator to approve or reject requests regardless of the approver list for the assigned processes.