Commitment Approvals

You can access the Commitment Approvals module from either Commitments and Invoices or My Reviews. The commitment approvals you see are based on the type of approval that is configured:

If the approval process is pooled, you see the commitments for activities associated with finance groups to which you belong.
If the approval process is by controlling funding account contact or by authorization rules, you see the commitments assigned to you for review.

Your system administrator configures the review process for commitments.

The approval process begins when you save and submit a commitment. The commitment cost is applied to the associated activities when the commitment is pending approval or approved.

Example:
You submit a commitment for approval. The approval process is configured so that the controlling funding account contact reviews the commitment. The controlling funding account contact accesses the review in the Commitment Approvals module in My Reviews, and approves the commitment. You can now associate invoices with the commitment.

Details

If necessary, you can edit the commitment during the approval. For more information, see the Key Fields section in Commitment Management.

Commitment Summary

This section appears on the Approve Commitment - Details page. It summarizes information about the commitment items. For more information, see the Commitment Summary section in Commitment Management.

Commitment Items

This section lists the individual items in the commitment. For more information, see the Commitment Items section in Commitment Management.

Closed Period Commitment Items

This section shows items that belong to periods that were closed due to a period closeout or an annual closeout.

Proposed Commitment Items and Current Commitment Items

If the commitment is a re-approval, you see the Current Commitment Items and the Proposed Commitment Items sections. The original approved amount and items are displayed separately from the newly proposed items and total. If you approve the re-approval, the newly proposed amount replaces the previously approved amount. If you reject the re-approval, the current commitment approval amount is retained.

Funding Account Summary

The Funding Account Summary section displays the funding accounts that fund the commitment based on the associated activity or activities. The Funding Account Summary section appears for approved commitments.

Approvals

The Approvals tab lists the users who are involved in the approval process. This tab appears if the Commitments Approval system parameter is set to use either authorization rules or the controlling funding account contact.

The setting of the Commitments Approval system parameter determines which kind of approval process is used.

Notifications

In a default environment, no notifications will be sent to invite a reviewer, or to inform the creator that a commitment has been reviewed.
If you need to have a commitment approval process with automatically sent notifications, your system administrator need to set the commitment approval system parameters to Yes:

For more information about the commitment approval configuration, parameters and notification options, please see Commitment Management.

For the financial system parameters, please see System Parameters: Financial Management Tab.