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[Music] good afternoon and welcome to the sweet approvals webinar presented by the Bester group today's presenter is Ross Cortese Ross has been working with sweet approvals in a client-facing role for gosh I don't know how long so for quite a while he's he knows all the ins and outs as all the use cases if you ever have questions about the best way to use sweet approvals or what are some interesting ways to use sweet approvals Ross has been working with lots and lots of our clients to be able to and kind of make sure that that you're in full control of your cycles of full control of your processes using sweet approvals and with that I'm gonna hand it to Ross Cortez for us are you still sporting the Quarantine mustache that I saw in the video conference I am yep until I'm please still got the mustache very nice all right well I will hand it off to you alright thanks Chris before we get started I just wanted to say if you have questions while I'm going please put those in the chat we will have time at the end of the presentation to go back and answer some questions so if at any point during the call if you have any questions put those in the chat make sure you send to everyone so we can all see it's a setting on your chat so just leave any questions you have and we will get to those at the end so sweet approvals is a pretty new module it was released by NetSuite in release 19.2 and it is NetSuite answer to previously how people were having to do most of their approvals through workflows setting up complex workflows lots of conditions lots of actions so just get transactions or records into the right hands for people to be able to review to approve to get an extra stage between creation of the record and the posting transaction so in 19.2 NetSuite released suite approvals to be able to take all of that that people were already doing through customizations and move it into core functionality so it's an exciting new module it is available right now there were a few upgrades in 20.2 but for the most part if you're still on 2019 and 20.1 sorry but for the most part if you're still in 2019 point two you can suite approvals and get going so like I said we are going to show you today how to say goodbye to your complex workflow approvals okay so available transactions for suite approvals currently suite approvals is available on journal entries expense reports purchase orders purchase requisitions vendor bills sales orders and engineering change orders the top six of those are obviously standard transactions engineering change orders is a part of the supply chain management bundle so if you don't have supply chain management you'll not see engineering change orders as a part of this module in the demo environment that I'm in today we don't have that enabled so you will see you won't see engineering change orders as an option but just know that if you have supply chain management enabled and you suite approvals suite app you will be able to add them to engineering change orders so first of all suite approvals allows for group approvals so you've probably seen already in that suite how you can set up groups for this example we have an employee group setup and we have this as our expense report approvers so you can set up groups of people to approve records any of those transactions and you just set up a group of people and that way they don't have to be all in the same business unit they don't have to have the same roles they can be completely divergent areas of your business but if you have these people that need to be able to approve certain records you can set up your groups put that as an available approver for these sweet approvers you can set it up to be all or any so if I have this group of four here if I just want any one the first person that sees it to approve it I can set it to any if I want all four of the people in this group to approve it before moving it to approval status I can set it to all and they will all get a notification and the record will stay and not approved or pending approval until the last person goes in and approves it similarly you can set up department approvers so departments most of them are set up on all transactions but you can set up one person to be the approver for a whole department and then you can basically route approvals for any of those transactions that are set to that apartment so that department so if you have a sales order that's for you know or a purchase order that's for admin for internal supplies that you want if you have admin set up as your department approver and you have an admin department approver that purchase order will automatically go to that approver for for approval if you have a warehouse department and you set up a purchase order for warehouse stuff that'll automatically route to that warehouse department approver so it gives you a lot of flexibility to have multiple transactions that you can have send multiple transactions to the same department approver if it's for their department you can also route approvals by amount so this was some of this functionality was available previously but they have vastly expanded it so you can see in the screenshot we have your expense limits your expense approvals purchase limits journal entry limits and what this is going to do is say for this user this is all on the employee record and this will say for this employee they can create an expense up to five hundred dollars themselves and they can approve an expense themselves up to one dollars so if I have this right on my employee and I submit an expense for $50 it doesn't have to go through any approvals it will be automatically marked approve approved as soon as I put an expense over a hundred dollars it's going to route to my expense approver who I have set up here that can be their direct supervisor that can be somebody else in the organization but it's a way to go through and build out all of your rules by employee to let them know what transactions they can enter and what their limits are you can also create custom approval rules so if you don't want to use the limits or you don't want to use their direct supervisor or the traditional company hierarchy you can set up custom rules to force the record to approval to any one of their employees supervisor you can submit it to a specific approver you can set it to the department approver like I showed earlier you can set it to a group or you can send approvals to anybody or everybody within a certain role to me the most exciting piece of this it seems inconsequential but it's an issue that our clients are having all the time is they have also with this release enabled the concept of delegating approvals so if I know I'm going to be out for the next week I know I have all these records that are going to be coming in throughout throughout the next week that need to be approved but I'm going to be gone I can go into my employee record or somebody can go into my employee record and set my delegate so you can create a start and end date and set your delegate and it will automatically route any transactions that are currently waiting for me to approve them as well as any new transactions that are going to come in so it's an exciting new piece of functionality that we previously had to just do incredibly complex workflows to be able to move the approval from one person to the other so just with a simple a very simple setup you can set up your delegate to approve all of your transactions so that is enough talking about it lets show sweet approvals so before I get started I because this is an approval flow I've had to set up several different employees and set up several different records within this so I'm going to be jumping around a little bit I'll try to keep it as a try to keep it as informative as I can but I will be going back and forth between different employee roles so I can approve transactions and see them after I login so first of all I'm going to look at my employee record we'll go into a bit of some of the expense and purchasing approval information that I showed so again here's where you come in if you use this the one downside is you have to go and set it up for every employee that can be entering or approving any of these transactions but as you can see I don't have approval to enter in all of the transactions just certain transactions so it is a it is a bit labor-intensive first-time set up but after you set it up once once you set the rules to use this rate you can just go and update it as needed but the rates will stay in there the approvals will stay in there and you pretty much just have to set at once so I'm going to go in and show you how to set up some approval rules so let's go ahead and create a new approval rule NetSuite has made a really nice way to do this basically once you're comfortable you can go through and just use the approval page or if you want some assistance it will tell you what you need to set up and the things you need to do so I'm to go to new approval page first and show you setting up and all the different options we can do to set this up so I'm going to set up just a test approval you can set start dates and end dates so if this approval doesn't go into effect until later this month you can set a start date into the future and as soon as that dates effective that rule will kick in and then you can set end dates to like the end of the year if you want or you can set it you can set it way into the future if this is going to be the rule that's going to continue you can set the subsidiary that this is active on you can set if you have a save search that you have set up to do certain transactions that you want this role this rule to approve apply to so if you have certain transactions by class that you have segregated out and you want you know only sales orders that are set to the class a to go through this approval rule you can have the Save Search be another condition to set up and then you set up your priority and the record that you're going to put it on so I'll set this one to requisition one thing I want to caution against especially when you start setting them up is once you haven't a have a rule created it cannot be removed until the end date has expired so and none of these fields once I save this none of these fields are editable except the end date so especially when you're first starting with approval rules you want to be very careful and make sure that you have your rule set up exactly how you want it because as soon as a transaction goes against that rule this approval rule cannot be deleted at all until all of the transactions against that rule have been completely moved through the approval so something you want to make sure that you have right the first time or if you don't get it right and you get a transaction against that rule you'll have to set up the end date to be the same as today and then move all of your approvals through for all of those transactions and then create a new rule starting effective tomorrow you cannot have two rules with the same start date or the same end date so you can set up multiple rules with multiple different priorities so if you have two rules for sales orders that you want to set priority to you do this generally you're going to set the priority to one and then this is where when we get into the approval routing this is where we talked about routing your approvals based on the amount so if I have this checked it is going to follow whatever is set up on this employee record so this is a requisition so I don't have a requisition set up here but there would be a similar requisition limit a similar requisition approval limit and a requisition approver so if I have this set up to route approvals based on amount it's going to use those factors and it's going to route your approvals through based on the total of the transaction the total you're approved for and the total you're allowed to enter it in and it's going to route it to your approval and then it'll route it to their approval until it gets to somebody who has enough approval set up to be able to do a final approval of that transaction so if I take this out and I'm going to route not on a amount I can set up custom approval hierarchies that's what I'm going to focus mostly on today is these custom approvals so within these approvals you can setup all of your different approver types like we said earlier you can do the employees direct supervisor which is set up on the employee record you can set it to a specific approver so if you want to just set it send it to one person in particular you can set it to the department approver that we showed earlier you can set it to a group and it can go to have only any of those people in the group approve it or you can set it to where all people in the group have to approve it the same with role you can set it to send to a specific role and anybody that has that role is allowed prove it for the final time or you can set it to everybody with that roll has to approve it so you can set up multiple levels to this so if you want to start and go to the employee supervisor and then once they approve it I want it to go to Kathy and she's going to approve it next that's the new approver child and then I want it to from there after Kathy approves it I want it to go to a group expense report approvers so you can tear this thing as much as you want you can go back to employee supervisor again if you want you can do as many tears in this thing as you need to to get your approvals to be as detailed or as broad as you need it so again this gives you a lot of flexibility for just point and click and I can set an approval for an entire record and catch any kind of you know anytime a record comes in I know who it's going to go to based on this level of hierarchy so first off we'll go into to show you I'm not going to save this one because it will not be easy to remove so first I'm going to go into an expense report approval so I have this one set up and I'm going to look at this expense report approval that I've set up I've named it expense report approval group to let me know that it's a group approver it's set to this subsidiary of Parent Child there is the ability to do cross subsidiary in twenty twenty point two you do have the ability to do cross subsidiary approval so if a person in one subsidiary submits the transaction you want somebody in a different subsidiary to be able to approve it there is some setup that you have to set on the the approvers employee record but they did release in twenty twenty point one the ability to have cross City area approvers so for this I have this set up to go to the expense report approvers if I go and look at this list and look at the groups this is the group that I've set up for expense report approvers so I've set up these for people to be able to approve expense reports right now only Alex Smith and approver child are set up to have full access bill Carr and Bill Humber will be able to view these but they will not be able to approve them only the people with full access can approve them so let's go ahead and and create an expense report to be able to see the approvals so I'm going to create an expense report for Mike and I'm going to go in here and create an expense and say category is accommodation and currency is the US dollar and Mike stated a really nice hotel so it was $1,000 a night and then you saw we talked about your department approver if I have a department approver that this needs to go to so say Mike's part of the engineering department and I have an engineering department approver set up and I want that to go to this person I can set that up to go to the department of prove ER if I have expenses set up to go to that in this case I have it set up to go to the group so I don't need to set the department the department is going to be based on all of our other categories and everything right now so let's go ahead and save this expense report I am in a demo environment so it is going to behave a little bit slower okay so right when it's created we see that the approval status is still in pending approval and it lets you know that it is running through the rule assignment right now and waiting to add the approver so if i refresh this you can see we set it up to go to the approver group so it's sent to Alex Smith and approver child and then if I click in approver history approval history you have all of the audit transaction all of the audit trail for this transaction to see what status it's in who started it what the approver type is and who's available to approve it so if I go look at my emails you'll see that I received this email this is I have my email setup for approver child and it tells me that I have this expense report that I need to go approve so if I go log in as expense approver child that was the wrong one okay so I'm logged in as a prove or child right now so if I go into expense reports and you can set up all your dashboards to have any transactions that are waiting for your approval to show up I don't have those set up now but you can get that all in the dashboard so we have Mike Daniels whoops that's the wrong one we just created this one and for Mike's I can come in here and review this and you see that I have the ability now to approve whereas my other login did not have the ability to approve because I submitted it so once I approve this transaction it will move into posting status and it will it will be available to be turned into a bill or be able to be accounted like I said I have this set up to be a group but anybody in the group can approve it so Alex does not need to approve this because I approve this and again if I go through the approval history you can see that Mike submitted it was approved by or submitted on behalf of Mike and anybody in this group could approve it and then approve her child came in and approve this so let me go back into my main login okay so let's go look at another another method okay so I'm going to go back into my approval rules and review those again and let's do a sales order so I have set up sales order approval to because sales order approval one did not work so I had to set up another one and I had already had approvals against the first one so you see that you cannot delete it so again just another reason why you need to make sure that when you put these in that you put them in correctly the first time because they're very hard to back out so for sales orders I have it set up to go to the department approver so this will be again whatever cells you set up all your department approvers and then whatever sales order department that sales order is for is who will receive the approval so right now I have one department approver set up so if I go in here and look at department approvers I set up an approver for the sales department and this approver is Michael J Scott so any sales orders that have the department of sales set up are going to go to Michael J Scott so Before we jump into a sales order I want to show that Michael J Scott is unfortunately or fortunately for him on vacation right now so before he left on vacation he came in and set up his approval delegation and said I'm going to be gone from the 27th until June 1st so I need Ross to approve Ross approver to approve all of my transactions so essentially whenever this comes through and whenever they set that if I go look at this employee record this employee got an email at that time to let them know that Michael Scott made you their delegate so it's an email that goes automatically it's system generated as soon as Michael Scott saves on his employee record that he's going to be out for that time it's going to automatically generate this email and send it to Ross approver and let him let him know that hey heads up anything that comes in for me you're going to need to approve so when I go in and set up a sales order I have one that I previously set up I'm going to make a copy of this so we have again sales order and then the department is set to sales so that's what tells this workflow or the sale tells this approval record that I need to send it to the sales department approver since I have department approver if the department is products and I don't have a Department approval approver set up it's going to automatically approve this transaction because I don't have a set an approver set up so if you do set up a transaction to have to route to a department approver you'll need to make sure that all of your departments that you can set the transaction to make sure that they all have a department approvers set up excuse me so I'm going to do a sales order for this item remember again because we didn't set up to use the approval by transaction amount it doesn't matter what this amount is it matters who we set up on the approval rule so when I save this transaction it will again be moved into pending approval status we have there is while it's running there is some consideration before you turn on approvals that you'll need to set certain criteria like you have to set up your sales orders to go to pending approval you have to turn on approval routing there's a lot of set pre setup that you have to set up but once it's all set up it'll run so right now my sales order is pending approval and it is awaiting the rule assignment so we'll give that another chance to hit the record so now we see that the sales order is in pinning approval and the next approver is Michael J Scott but Michael Scott has designated Ross approver to be this approver so if Michael is has his computer and he's available to approve it he still has access to approve it but if he cannot get to it and you need to get a transaction move through Ross approver does have the ability to go and approve this transaction so if I go login as Ross approver I can go in and look at that transaction and again emails are coming through all the time to tell you that transactions were created waiting for your approval the one for this sales order will come in shortly but all of those are also available on the employee record so if I open the sales order we created earlier we can see that now I have the button available for to approve because Ross approver is the delegated approver for this transaction so I can approve it and now the sales order is available to be fulfilled whereas before it could not be fulfilled until it was approved again we have our approval information the day it was created and then if I check approval history we've got a full record of everybody that touched this so if you have multiple layers of approvals each time a new approval goes through or each time it's submitted or resubmitted its rejected and resubmitted all of the all of the audit history automatically will be on this record so this approval history tab is automatically enabled when you the suite approval suite app so we'll show one last example now log back in as Ross and let's go look at get rid of some of these we'll look at setting a specific approver so journal entry approver I have set up to be a specific user again I have Michael J Scott set up as my specific approver you might use this if you have one accounting person that is the head of the whole department and no matter what it no matter who it's for no matter how it's created I want all journal entries to go to Michael J Scott for approval so I've set up my journal entry and I have all of my journal entries no matter what the company no matter what the class is no matter what the department is no matter what is set up on this I want all of it to go to Michael J Scott so again Michael is out so he has set Ross approver up to be the approver so let's make a copy of this journal entry that I've set up earlier and I am NOT an accountant so if these two balances don't make any sense I apologize for that but I just needed a transaction to get through so I'm going to create this journal entry to credit cash and debit accounts receivable and create this journal entry so the reason this is important is previously journal entries were not available for workflow approvals they're an automatically posting transaction so as soon as the journal entry is created it's it's posted and there was no way to set up an approval on it so this is a pretty important step that you can add now on journal entries to be able to create a transaction that is in pinning approval status and it does not automatically post so there's less cleanup if you need to reject this it hasn't been posted you don't have to do a counter journal entry you don't have to go and try and remove the journal entry so for audit traceability for the you know for the visibility in all of your transactions it's a very important thing to be able to now do so we're still awaiting the approval rule assignment and we see that it was sent to Ross approver as the delegate for Michael Jay Scott specific approver was Michael Jay Scott but it is sent to Ross approver and you can see the GL impact we should have no GL impact against it yet well it's on there but it's not posting right so it has not been posted but it tells you what the GL impact will be so if I go back and log in as Ross approver and I approve this journal you will see that it has now been approved for posting and if I check the GL impact it is now a posting transaction so we created the record we created all of the GL impact but we did not post it until it was approved so again like I said this is a very very simple way to conceive your approvals to create important levels of hierarchy to route transactions to people without having to go in and create a workflow with a thousand different criteria and a bunch of different actions and different scripts and different rules and you can set up very very simple approvals or you can set up very complex approvals depending on whatever your organization needs you can use suite approvals to give yourself that extra level of accountability of traceability you know if you're concerned about an audit you have all of these transactions that you're able to say definitively this transaction did not get created or it did not get posted until the right people saw it and the right people approved it so that's all I have for today like I said this is there's a lot more to this for time sake I wanted to show some basics but if you have more questions about this or you want to see you know maybe an expanded demo you want to see how things look or how they would be for your business please feel free to reach out to us at the best of group we would be more than happy to set up one-on-one time with you to go through how suite approvals can help your business how you can set it up we can help you the bundle in sandbox let you try it out and try some approvals so please feel free to reach out to us and at this time I will go and see if we have any questions if you have a question feel free to put it in the chat box so it should be in the bottom of your bottom of your window there's a little chat you're free to type the question in there and we'll give a couple of minutes for any questions to pop up Robert Wood using group any negate the need to delegate approval absolutely so it doesn't necessarily negate it but it would kind of alleviate that so if you have if you do set up a group and anybody in that group can approve it you still can set up delegates for a specific user of that group but that would just give you an extra person to be able to get eyes on it but absolutely if you have it set up to group any only one person in that group has to approve it for it to be moved to approved but you can use those things together okay from Todd does NetSuite offer any reporting that provides insight into the approval rules that have been defined not that I know of so I'm assuming you're asking if they have transactions that are currently awaiting a certain rule I don't believe so I haven't seen anything out of the box to do that but it might be there and it might be able to be set up but I have not so far found that I don't want to say it's definitely not but I don't know that off the top of my head excuse me again from Robert is group all the same as parallel approvals I'm not particularly familiar with parallel approvals so I can't really say but it's essentially what group all does is it's not sequentially does not have to be sequential but the transaction will not move into approve status until everybody in that group has approved it so it will sit in pending approval until every single person in the group has gone in and marked it approved is the approval rule record available via Save Search I can find that out real quick I don't know that off the top of my head approval rule is available via Save Search so here's all your approval rules in the script you might be able to do transactions associated with those but I don't know that at the top of my head it does not look like it is available so it is just the search for all of your different approval rules which you can also look at by going to your list of approval rules so that's the safe search isn't going to give you much more information than you get right here hey Robert is there a way to set the end date to avoid having to periodically renew the rule yes you can just set it up when I have an end date that I want to not expire I usually set it up to twelve thirty one nine thousand that's generally the typical end of the end dates but you can set it up to to be the end of time essentially nine nine nine nine but you can set up the end date to be way in the future so you don't have to renew it and again like I said the in date is the only thing that's editable so if I go and look at one of these sales order approver if I would go look at one of these rules and edit it the only thing that I can edit on this record is the end date so again very critical that if you have anything set up in here it'll tell you that it's running but you can change the end date so if I got this rule wrong and I want to create a new rule I can set the end date to be 428 I can set it to be today and save it and then as of time I can create a new rule that has a start date of tomorrow but any transactions that were created during this time will be stuck to this rule so you have to go through and set up so this sells approvals that I set up earlier this is not running but I set this up to end date yesterday whenever I was setting up my demo because I didn't like how I had it set up but if I go try and delete it it will tell me that there it's in use because there is a transaction out there that is not fully approved once the transactions are all the way approved you can set it to inactive or you can delete it but as long as there's transactions against the rule the rule cannot be removed okay so Todd asks do you know if NetSuite has incorporated any changes to the month-end checklist regarding outstanding journal entry approvals I would assume so since the transactions don't post until approved I don't know that off the top of my head Todd but I would your assumption would be the same assumption that I would have that it would say you have not non posted journal entries because they haven't been approved but I do not know that for sure John asks can you edit the approvers on a saved rule and the answer to that is also no I'm hoping that this is something that NetSuite gets modified but I understand their reasoning behind it because they don't want they don't want you to try and change a rule while it's running because you may have outstanding transactions against it so the only thing you can do while an approval rule is running or while there are active transactions against it is set up a delegate to whoever it's currently at so if you have a sales order that's currently set to Mike Daniels but you need to change that you can set somebody to be Mike Daniels delegate for the day to have somebody go in and make those approvals and then you would have to in date that approval rule and create a new one for the following effective date so the start date of tomorrow because you cannot change you cannot change approvers for an existing approval rule it'll tell you you can but it bombs out I lost my chat box in a second okay so it will let you do it this is a non running approval rule so I spoke a little too soon John this one will let me remove them because this is not running and it's not active but it will probably if I try and save that yeah it's going to bomb that out because no so it will let me it will let me change this one this approval rule oh it will not okay that's right so it is being used so it will not let me change it if it is not being used if you have no transactions against it you can theoretically change it but for the most part the my best practice would be if you mess up and you put one in just handle all the transactions that come in for that day set your end date and then update the and set the one for to start as of tomorrow any more questions well it looks like one more has NetSuite published any documentation regarding rule creation examples and best practices within the suite answers and of a user's guide yes kind of I will say so again it is pretty new functionality it is essentially eight months old around roundabout eight months old so there are not a lot of best practices but there are some sweet answers available for the most part it's just going to give you a how to it is pretty limited as of right now with sweet answers I do expect that to be expanded as this becomes more widely adopted but there is not currently a lot out there on sweet answers you can set up so what I will say is the sweet answers for this is very good for if you want to enable it it is very good about telling you all of the prerequisites you have to set up for each transaction to be able to use it so the setup of it excuse me is there and it is extensive but the best practices is not as robust as as we would like to see it yet mmm-hmm any more questions yep so John says Oh Ross thank you for your time you should advocate for a breakout session at the suite world 2020 and sit on the panel I appreciate that I will we will definitely advocate for a breakout session for sure because I think it's something that's kind of gone under the radar the suite approvals I learned about it only a few months ago and I've been diving in really hard since because it feels like it answers a lot of questions that we get constantly so we will advocate for a breakout session thank you for for saying that we will that is something that we will do and I hope that they will allow us to again this will be before we in this will be recorded Chris will be editing it and will be putting it up on our website so we'll be able to send out a link for the Pope for the link to this meeting so you'll be able to go through and disseminate throughout your organization Todd says the impact for financial audits is huge especially for journal entries could not agree more we were we were looking into at them here at the best group we were looking at creating a base functionality for journal entry approvals because it is extremely critical right so to have that layer of audit traceability for those journal entries we created something similar for inventory adjustments since those are automatically posting we created in-house an inventory adjustment approval and we were looking into doing something for journal entries as well but this kind of solves that so could not agree more the impact of this and the impact especially on month end accounting financial audits journal entries is massive it's very important and it's nice that they have made it available for everybody so feel free if you want to if you want to enable this in your sandbox account there is you'll have to be a little bit careful if you have approval workflow set up it will create a little bit of weird kind of funky behavior if you're having if you have workflow approval set up but you obviously don't for journal entries because that didn't exist before so if you want to set it up in your sandbox account and the suite app bundle you can do that right away like I said it is even if you're on 20 19.2 the only things that they've updated for twenty twenty point one is cross subsidiary approvals and the availability of requisitions requisitions are not available in twenty nineteen point two but they are available in twenty twenty point one so with that I think if there are no more questions Robert says thank you for your time Robert thank you for joining we really do appreciate it well thank you Marty yep as as as Ross mentioned this will be recorded and put on our website and we'll be sitting links to everybody so thank you guys we appreciate your time thank you buddy [Music]