Organizational structure and hierarchy within Spend Cloud
By linking an employee to one or more job profiles within the organizational structure, you assign that employee a role in the organization. The organizational structure is used to determine where in the organization the employee will fulfill that role.
The organizational structure in Spend Cloud is built using so-called organizational units, which also establish the hierarchy within the structure. The organizational structure forms the foundation for the procuration scheme within various modules, so it's essential to ensure every possible approval flow is included.
It's important to design the organizational structure in a clear and intuitive way to maintain readability and user-friendliness. An additional advantage is that it becomes easier to assign employees with one or more roles to the appropriate place in the organizational structure.
This article is about the hierarchy within Spend Cloud. Do you want to know more about adding Organizational units and roles? Then read the following articles: Structure and Roles.
Procuration Scheme
Before an invoice/order/expense claim is exported to the financial system, it must be assessed by one or more employees. To determine which employee(s) are authorized to assess the expense, a procuration scheme must be defined in Spend Cloud. Based on this scheme, the invoice/order/expense claim follows a specific route — known as a workflow — through the relevant employees.
Procuration Levels
To ensure that no actions fall through the cracks, it's important to use procuration levels. A procuration level refers to the maximum amount an employee is authorized to assess. These authorizations are (as mentioned earlier) defined in a job profile. To implement multiple procuration levels within a workflow, the workflow must include various approval thresholds across one or more organizational units.
From Organizational Structure to Procuration Scheme
Employees are ultimately linked to a specific place in the organizational structure via a job profile, thereby receiving a defined role in the organization. These roles together form the procuration scheme.
Do you want to view the procuration scheme? Go to the menu Application management / Organization / Roles. Only select one module in the filters on the left side of the page and click select. You will now get a full overview of all roles, including the procuration within the selected module. You can use this overview for accountancy checks.
Key principles when setting up an procuration scheme:
- It's possible to assign multiple roles with different procuration levels to one organizational unit for different employees.
- If the procuration level at a given organizational unit is not sufficient for the invoice, the roles from the parent organizational unit will be used.
Other Considerations
- Approval checks are always based on the total amount.
- Only for Invoice Processing: An invoice is by default offered to one employee at the lowest procuration level. It is also possible to offer invoices to a group of employees at the lowest procuration level within the selected organizational unit. Want to know more about this feature? Read the article Assessing Invoices by a Group of Employees. Invoices requiring a higher procuration level are always offered to all employees with that procuration level, and approval by one of them is sufficient. This means that an employee might receive a notification to assess an invoice, which may already have been assessed by a colleague.
- You can configure per procuration level whether all employees must approve. This means an invoice, order, or expense claim will need to be approved by all individuals with the same procuration level within the selected organizational unit. This can be configured per procuration level in the Application Management section under Expense Claims / Invoice Processing / Procurement / Procuration.
Contract Management
There is no procuration scheme applicable for contract management. To register a contract, only an action from the contract owner is needed to confirm the registration or initiate a renewal or termination.
Cash & Card
The Cash & Card module also behaves differently regarding the procuration scheme. You can find more about this in the article Organizational Structure for this module.
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