Bills may become stuck in approval depending on how you’ve configured your approval workflow. To resolve bills that are stuck in approval, bill admins will first have to update their approval workflow configuration to ensure there are enough approvers in each step to ensure all bills can be approved. Once that is done, either the submitting user or a bill admin can recall the stuck bill and resubmit. Once resubmitted, the bill will go through the updated approval workflow.
Example 1. Let’s say you’ve set up a workflow like the below:
- Step 1: User A approves
- Step 2: User B or User C approves
- Are users allowed to approve bills that they submit? No
- Are users allowed to approve bills in more than one approval step? No
If User A submits a bill, then the bill will become blocked in approval because User A is the only approver in step 1 but is not allowed to approve their own submitted bill.
Example workflow, where Kim is User A and Rhea is User B
Example 2. Let’s say this time you’ve got a workflow like the below:
- Step 1: User A approves
- Step 2: Any admin can approve (at the time of workflow setup, admins are User A and User B in the account)
- Are users allowed to approve bills that they submit? No
- Are users allowed to approve bills in more than one approval step? No
Example workflow, where Kim is User A and Rhea is User B
Between the time of the workflow being set up and the bill being submitted, User B leaves the company and is removed from the account. That leaves User A as the only admin in the account. If User C submits a bill, User A will approve in the first step but the bill will become blocked at the second step. This is because the only remaining admin in the account is User A, who has already approved in the first step and is not allowed to approve in multiple steps.
When a bill becomes blocked in approval, an error alert will surface on the bill details letting the user know that the bill cannot be approved due to missing approvers.
In order to address this issue, Bill administrators must first update their approval workflow configuration to ensure that there are an adequate number of approvers at each step to ensure the approval of all bills. Once this configuration is updated, either the user who initially submitted the bill or a Bill administrator can recall the bill that is currently stuck and then resubmit it. Upon resubmission, the bill will proceed through the revised approval workflow.