Approving Billing Invoices

Use the Invoice Approval feature to set up an approval process for client invoices that moves draft invoices through the submittal, approval, and acceptance stages, speeding up the billing process.

The Invoice Approval process sends electronic alerts to the appropriate employees to notify them that the next action in the approval process is ready for them to complete. Approvers can share comments about the draft invoices.

Enable Invoice Approvals and Set Up Approval Processes

Enable Invoice Approvals for your company on the Miscellaneous tab of the Billing Setup form (Settings > Billing > General in the desktop application).

Your company can set up multiple approval processes on the Invoice Approval Process form (Settings > Billing > Invoice Approval Process in the desktop application). For each approval process, you determine who can approve and reject invoices (project managers or principals, for example), who receives alerts at each stage of the process, and the type and frequency of those alerts.

Invoice Approval Process

The normal approval process includes the following stages:

• Submittal: The person responsible for submitting invoices for the project uses either Interactive Billing or Batch Billing to submit the invoice for approval. When an invoice is submitted, DPS sends an alert to the person responsible for approving invoices for the project. Once submitted, the invoice is available for review in Invoice Approvals and Interactive Approvals.
• Approval: The person responsible for approving invoices uses the Invoice Approvals form or Interactive Approvals form to review and approve submitted invoices. When an invoice is approved, DPS sends an alert to the person responsible for accepting invoices and initiating final billing for the project.

  The approver can also reject a submitted invoice. In that case, DPS sends an alert to the person designated to receive the rejection alert so that the recipient can address any problems with the invoice.

Enable Invoice Approval for a Project

If Invoice Approvals are enabled for your company, you can enable or disable them for individual projects. If your company has more than one invoice approval process set up, you can also select the process that you want to use for the project. Both of these settings are on the Misc tab of the Billing Terms form.

You enable Invoice Approvall and select an approval process at the top level of the work breakdown structure. For example, if you choose an approval process in which the project manager is the approver, the project manager for the top level of the work breakdown structure will be the approver for all lower work breakdown structure levels, too.

Similarly, if you use billing groups, you enable Invoice Approvals for a billing group by enabling it for the main project. In that case, if the project manager is the approver specified in the approval process, the project manager for the top level of the work breakdown structure for the main project is the approver for all of the sub-projects in the billing group.

If invoice approval is enabled for a project, all invoices for the project must be approved before you can accept them for final billing.

Delegate Responsibility for Approvals

You can delegate responsibility for invoice approvals to another person. That person receives the same approval alerts that you would normally receive and has the same access to approve and reject invoices. To delegate responsibility, on the toolbar, click and click My Preferences. On the General tab, select the Delegate Approvals to option.