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Reports and compliance

Approvals: what needs a second signature

One machine for everything one person must not do alone: a rule says what needs approving, at how many levels, by whom, above what amount; the queue is where it is signed.

Menu → Approvals. A second signature on what one person must not do alone — a large hand-posted journal, a refund above a limit, a vendor's bank account changing, a closed month being reopened. Until September each of those that needed one had built its own; now there is one machine and one queue.

The Approvals screen: the queue of requests waiting, and the Rules and Payments received tabs.
The Approvals screen: the queue of requests waiting, and the Rules and Payments received tabs.

Do this

  1. The queue — every request waiting for a signature: what it is, its reference, the amount, who asked and when, how many signatures it needs.
  2. Open a row to Approve or Reject it, with a reason. Every level must be a *different* person; a reject ends it.
  3. Rules — what needs approving at this account.
  4. Payments received — the accountant's second look at money recorded on bookings; see A payment is trusted first, and verified after.
The Rules tab: one row per kind of thing, its threshold, the role that signs and how many levels.
The Rules tab: one row per kind of thing, its threshold, the role that signs and how many levels.

A rule

For a kind of thing — a manual journal, a refund, a write-off, a vendor bill with no purchase order, a vendor payment, a vendor bank change, a credit override, reopening a month, a rate override, an owner distribution, a budget — a rule says the threshold (blank = always), a department (blank = any), the role that must sign, how many levels (one to three), and whether the requester may sign their own (they may not, unless the rule says so). A rule can be scoped to one legal entity. No rule, nothing to approve — the action goes through as it always did.

Three sentences it refuses with

*The person who asked for this cannot sign it.* *You have already signed this.* *This needs a manager or higher to sign.* Each is a rule doing its job; the answer is the other person's signature, not a workaround.

Separation of duties

The third tab names pairs of rights one person must not hold together (raising a vendor bill and paying it, for one) and lists who does. It reports; it does not block. A delegation lets one user act with another's authority for a span of dates — leave cover — and the signature says whose authority it was.

Where it is wired today

Reopening a closed month refuses without an approved request once the account has a *period unlock* rule — see Closing the month by a list. A vendor's bank change has been two-person since payables were built and keeps its own path. The remaining "approved by" boxes across the books move onto this machine as each is next touched.

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