How to Approve an Invoice

Context:	Workday Financials is our new financial system at DSST (replacing Blackbaud). This article will cover how to approve an invoice once it has been submitted to Workday.
Purpose:	Follow these steps to approve (or make changes to) an invoice. An invoice needs to be approved for a supplier/vendor to receive payment.
Intended Audience:	Budget Owners across DSST.

1. Once an invoice has been submitted via email, Workday automatically ingests the invoice and puts it into a work queue for the Finance team to review.

2. Finance initially codes the invoices based on knowledge of prior invoices and Workday-provided AI. 

3. With the given coding, Workday runs an initial budget check and returns the invoice to Finance if the transaction puts the specific line over budget (i.e. if it was coded as Athletics and there is no more budget in that line item). The budget check is run through the current month, not the annual budget. If you're spending faster than budgeted in a budget line like Athletics, Finance will likely manually approve and pass the budget check on. Finance either recodes or moves the transaction on to the school or Home Office department. 

4. If you are listed as a Budget Owner/Invoice Approver for your school or Home Office department, a task will appear in your Workday inbox to approve the invoice if it meets the appropriate criteria.

For schools, it will come to you if the invoice hits your school on a discretionary budget line.

For the Home Office, it will come to you if the invoice hits your budget department.

You will also receive an email from Workday, alerting you of the task. 

If you would like to review a list of your school's/department's Budget Owners/Invoice Approvers, or believe you should be added to the list, please reach out to the Finance team. 

5. Click on the task and look for the budget check status (near the top of the details page): Pass, Warn (Insufficient Budget YTD) or Fail (No Budget in that line).

6. Action Step - The first time you come into this task, you'll notice your coding on the very far right and not quickly available. You can change the order of the columns (once you do this once, it'll be your view every time going forward) by clicking the Column Preferences table and then dragging the fields you want to see first closer to the top. The recommended order is in the screen shot below. Click Apply when you are done. 

7. Review the following information:

• Cost Center (Schools Only) - Does this invoice belong to my school? 
• Budget Department (Home Office Only) - Does this transaction belong to my Home Office Department? 
• Budget Line - Is this on the correct budget line? Budget lines align to what they're named in Adaptive. 
• Sub-Budget - Schools will only be approving transactions that are hitting their discretionary budget. If it should not be hitting your discretionary budget, send it back with that note.

8. You can view the invoice directly by clicking the "Attachments" tab if you need more information on what's being paid

9. After reviewing all the information and coding, you can do one of three things: 

• Approve as is (by clicking the blue Approve button). 
• Make changes to the budget line column only, for example, moving from Athletics to Student Activities. If you do so, please write a comment that you made the change and then click approve (by clicking the blue Approve button).
• Send back to Jullisa Torres with a comment on why (click the Send Back button). We want to restart any invoice back to step 3 to re-run the budget check and route the invoice to the appropriate Budget Owner. Use this option if you want to change the cost center, budget department, or sub-budget of the transaction as that may indicate a different approver necessary and a different budget to check against. Also, send it back if you have no clue why you're receiving this invoice to approve, so we can further investigate!

6. The invoice is now ready for payment! Finance will process payments regularly. Keep in mind invoices will not be processed if they are sitting in your approval queue in Workday. 

7. Coming soon! Once approved, a report is available titled "DSST Transaction Report" which shows your most recent transactions to hit the budget lines you care about. From there, you can drill into the invoice to see if/when it has been paid, by what method, and what check number if applicable. Please start here if you're looking for payment status before emailing the Finance team.