Document Overview

Important:

This functionality is only accessible for system administrators.

• Blocked: Documents for which no workflow can be generated or that are assigned to an approver that does not exist.
• In progress: Documents that are waiting for an approval decision by one or more approvers.
• Approved: Documents that are approved by all approvers in the workflow and are sent back to the other service.
• Rejected: Documents that are rejected by an approver and are sent back to the other service.
• Cancelled: Documents that are cancelled by the other service.

Actions for blocked documents

A blocked document always requires an action from you or another system administrator. There are several possible actions to take:

Approve or Reject directly

Select the document(s) and click either Approve directly or Reject directly. This changes the status of the document to either Approved or Rejected, and the document is sent back to the other service. No other approvers will be involved in the process.

Note that this feature requires that you also have the approver role for the given document type.

Send for Approval

A document becomes blocked because the workflow is not set up correctly or because the assigned approver does not exist.

Select the blocked document and click Send for approval. You will receive an error message that gives you insight as to where the mistake is. To prevent documents from becoming unresolved at a later stage, you can change the Cost units or About Workflows.

Once you have corrected the set up, you can click Send for approval and the correct workflow appears. Click OK and the document will be sent to the first approver(s). If you do not manually resend the document for approval, it will be automatically resent at night if the set up is correct.

Email

There is also a possibility to email a blocked document outside the system, by using the Email button in the bottom right corner. Select the document, click on Email, fill in the required fields, and send the email.

Common reasons for blocked documents

There are several reasons why a document is being blocked. Here are some of the most common reasons:

• Cost unit has no approver assigned to it
• Expense claims only: the requester is also the approver
• All steps have amount limits and no step is invoked because of that
• There is no active workflow for the document type
• The workflow is set up to resolve on, for example cost units, but no cost units are defined in the documents

Edit document

If available, you can edit the document so that an approver can be found, for example, by changing the cost units on the document. To do so, open the blocked document and click the Edit button. Perform the changes, save and then click Send for approval to see if the document can be sent to an approver. See also: Editing the document.