Journal Verification Workflow - By Manager

[rb2020]

Hello - we have sought to use the General Journal Entry verification workflow, but found the options available to organize the workflows in the app to lack an efficient option for us.  Via the standard app it appears you can only utilize Company Code, Cost Center, Account Group, and Amount Threshold to determine who must review a journal entry.  I find this very strange as in many scenarios a person's manager is what determines who approves their entry - not the legal or management accounting structure of the company?  

Has anyone done custom work to implement a personnel-based workflow?  Or is this a planned improvement at some point?

Secondly - we considered changing to 'cost center' as the main driver, but then found that the way the app works, only one "workflow" can kick off for each journal entry.  Again, I'm confused, as since many entries include multiple cost centers in any accounting environment - this instantly becomes nearly impossible to maintain.  If you have even 10 cost centers, you either must accept that journals will go coincidentally to whichever cost center approver's workflow is highest in the list, OR maintain a workflow for every possible combination - which would be 45 workflows for just 10 cost centers and growing exponentially.  Have I misinterpreted the capabilities of the app?

Lastly - we understand that if a journal entry submitter happens to be a member of the verifying group of the workflow, they would receive and could post their own journal.  This is again a significant weakness that reduces value of this app significantly for us, have I misinterpreted?

[LilingJia · Accepted solution]

Hello Rob,

Thank you so much for considering the ‘General Journal Entry verification workflow’ which developed by our team. And thank you for raising some much questions to us.

We also found the concept of workflow might be quite new to many customers, thus we have wrote separate chapter ‘Enabling and Extending Workflows’ in https://help.sap.com/ with process flow.

Generally speaking there are two steps configuration.

1. Define when to trigger workflow. Use app ‘Manage Workflows for General Journal Entry Verification’

2. Define who to approve the workflow. Depending on the recipients roles that you select when configuring a workflow, you can use the Define Responsibilities app or the Manage Teams and Responsibilities - General Journal Entry Verification app to define proper processors. [Also depends on which system version you have]

Back to your questions

1. ‘you can only utilize Company Code, Cost Center, Account Group, and Amount Threshold to determine who must review a journal entry’

 All above criteria are for ‘when to trigger workflow’ , not for who is approver. You have more possibilities via ‘Manage Teams and Responsibilities’. For more information, you could check the latest help portal document for your system version. https://help.sap.com/

2. ‘Has anyone done custom work to implement a personnel-based workflow?’

 If you are using the ‘Manage Teams and Responsibilities’ to define who to approve, there is possibility to extend. This is common steps for extend the ‘who to approve’ logic for all flexible workflow for S4HANA.

Steps like below

Step1: Open ‘Manage Your solution’ app

Step2: Click ‘Configure your solution’

Step3: Choose 'Configure responsibility definitions for responsibility management'

Step4: Define Customizing Fields and click save and exit

Step5: Back to worklist, click Teams for Responsibility Management

Step6: Click Configure for ‘Map Custom Responsibility Definitions to Standard Team Category’

Step7: Open Fiori APP: Manage Teams and Responsibilities and here you could see the new extended field.

For the personal based approver, you could then use the CDS view ‘C_GLJRNLENTRYTOBEVERIFIED’ field ‘PARKEDBYUSER’.

3. If you have 10 cost center, you don’t need 45 workflows. But you might need 10 teams defined in ‘Manage Teams and responsibilities’

4. Submitter could never approve/post his own journal. This is prevented in the system already.

Hope this could help to better understand the logic. If you still feel the your process could not be fulfilled, you are welcomed to contact us.

Best regards,

Liling Jia

[rb2020 · Accepted solution]

riwamouawad I attempted your custom work around (and to note, as stated i genuinely believe that in most Finance departments approval by a person's manager is the most likely scenario, so not sure why this is not standard delivered functionality). First - I assume that you mean in step 4 that I would use CDS view C_GLJRNLENTRYTOBEVERIFIED and field PARKEDBYUSER? If so, I only receive the attached error when attempting to do so.

I went to the 'custom CDS views' fiori app, found the C_GLJRNLENTRYTOBEVERIFIED view, and noted that the status actually says "released". Can you please help us get through the steps you've laid out?

As a question in advance, you say in step 6 to click on that configuration. However, you do not say what to do there?

[rb2020 · Accepted solution]

Please refer to the attached file.

[rb2020 · Accepted solution]

jessica.jia Riwa is correct, would you please address my question instead?

[riwamouawad · Accepted solution]

rb2020 I believe you are mixing my response to the question you had with jessica.jia 's response.

[former_member737011 · Accepted solution]

Hi jessica.jia

I tried maintaining the custom personnel based workflow on my system. But, not sure how the workflows would be designed in such a case. Does it mean if I have 100 different teams created in the system, I will have to create 100 workflows for each team ?

[former_member34 · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

You have a question and need help by the community? Instead of posting into an old question thread, it is more helpful for you, if you create your own question. Here is how to get started:

1. Learn about asking and answering questions in SAP Community with this tutorial: https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/community-qa.html
2. Ask your detailed question here: https://answers.sap.com/questions/ask.html
3. Wait for a response.

That's it. Thank you!

Best regards

Jennifer

Your SAP Community moderator

[former_member796378]

Hi all, the central bank of Argentine set a deadline of five days to post preliminary journals entries.

How can I add this deadline to the workflow? Is there any standard solution?

[mtalaat8]

How many levels of approval can you have?

Manager A

Manager B

Manager C

Manager N'

[Song_Ling]

Liling J, could you please share the details for workflow rules by different approver based on cost center grouping. For example, all sales related cost center will be approved by A where all production cost center will be approved by B in a single company code. From your post, I understand that one workflow scenario to be created with precondition with company code 11XX, where the step sequence Verify General Entry will be split by Team A (Sales related) and Team B (production related). I tried this and it is not working. Am I misunderstand your explanation?

Appreciate your feedback.

[former_member638590]

Hi Liling,

This is relating to S4HANA 1809 on-premise version and also relating to Journal entry verifier, so wondering you are able to respond or not on this. If you can then would appreciate the information on the possibility of custom logic for agent determination.

For agent determination, since manage teams and responsibilities option requires to manage HR organisational data, exploring use of a customised table and a function module instead to make the approver management easy.

The requirement is simple. What we want is amount based determination for how many levels and who should approve e.g. if amount < 10000, only level 1 need to approve. However if > 10000 then approval is 2 levels.

So was thinking of maintaining a table which would have the level and for that level the various approvers. Could you be able to explain how would you do this ?

[LilingJia]

Hi Krishanna,

Sorry for coming back so late.

It looks like what you request is a Multi-level workflow, which is supported in 1809 already.

Could you please check 'example 2' in this page and then try in your system?

https://help.sap.com/viewer/651d8af3ea974ad1a4d74449122c620e/1809.000/en-US/d372cc4a14fa40f5b930eb9c...

Just come back to me if you have further questions.

Liling

[former_member626129]

Hi Liling,

When we are trying to configure the CDS View:C_GLJRNLENTRYTOBEVERIFIED with the field name- PARKEDBYUSER in the configuration step Map Custom Responsibility Definition to CDS View we are seeing the issue as "For unreleased CDS views in SAP namespace, only custom fields are allowed".

Please suggest us how to proceed further.

Thanks in Advance....

Thanks!

Sairam

[former_member94298]

Lots of interesting discussion here. To add my thoughts:

-journal workflows are a really common requirement - and system-wise, the workflows in Finance do seem to lag a bit behind those in purchasing (it's fairly obvious that there are separate product development teams, and no one seems to look at the big picture re consistency).

- totally agree that having to use a separate app to kick off the workflow is a but clunky - and when you look at the out of the box roles, there is no segregation between entry and posting / approval in roles (unless this has changed recently) - which is a huge gap

- there seems to still be nothing in Finance around handling deadlines for workflows - again, a gap

- not sure that I agree that the most common approval route is to the user entering the data's manager... but it definitely seems common to want to route workflows differently according to the account code used - would be good to have something to support this?

- definitely more thought needed around the handling of multi line journals - as this is a really common real world situation

[rb2020]

riwamouawad Sorry coming back late to this - In your original post you stated that utilizing a "by user" workflow was possible. This specific reply seems to imply potentially it is not possible since it is not a pre-condition delivered out of the box. Can you reconcile that for me?

[riwamouawad]

Hi rb2020,

User ID is not a precondition delivered out of the box for the JE workflow.

Best,

Riwa

[former_member95896]

We were also trying to utilize the JE Workflow functionality and ran into similar issues. Initially we wanted to group specific sets of GL accounts to approvers and then tried to switch to a user and amount specific workflow setup and neither appear to be supported. We'll explore if adding the teams/responsibilities scope item will help unlock some functionality post 1908 release as the SSCUI above isn't available if it isn't.

Another issue that we had is workflow isn't supported if you upload your journal entries from what we've heard (which we do 95% of the time, several of which have several hundred to a thousand or more line items). Having to use a separate app and only being able to manual entry at this point really hurt the functionality for us and our adoption along with the limits of the workflow structure.

[riwamouawad]

Hi rpmuller - just one point I would like to clarify: In order to utilize the JE workflow/approval you have to use the application “Verify Journal Entries for Requester" which is an application that is different than the one you might be using today. That being said, there is upload functionality within that application as well via an upload template.

Best,

Riwa

[former_member95896]

riwamouawad If that app just kicks off Post General Journal Entries and Upload General Journal Entries, why don't you have the ability to just submit directly out of those apps to workflow and save the additional step and clicks for the users requesting approval?

I'm happy that it calls on the existing apps and supports uploaded journal entries (we were told otherwise, and I still have concerns about large je's we commonly upload). If it could support the personnel and amount based workflow Rob B discussed above we might be in business.

[riwamouawad]

rpmuller The “Verify Journal Entries for Requester" application is what triggers the workflow. If the application is not used then there is no workflow triggered or sent and the JE is automatically posted. In order to support the personnel and amount based workflow a pre-condition for User ID is needed, which is currently not a pre-condition that is delivered out of the box. The amount rules/threshold is supported out of the box, so that is not an issue. In order to achieve a User ID pre-condition, we invite you to create a request on the Customer Influence Portal.

[HenrikeGrötecke]

Please also refer to:

Workflow of Verification for General Journal Entries

https://help.sap.com/viewer/0fa84c9d9c634132b7c4abb9ffdd8f06/Latest/en-US/f93a8ef54de144c8befe6eb646...