I do agree with this very much. Transaction approval is a very powerful control feature.
In an environment with two or more officers using the app, a senior officer should be able to approve or disapprove transactions, this is like the last control point to prevent unauthorized transactions into the general ledger.
This means the audit trail will also show “Approved By”.
Users should be able to toggle the feature on or off because some users in a small organisation may want direct posting like the app does now.
This feature maybe more complex than you think.
For example, In a situation where an organisation has a very busy account payable department and therefore a leader who oversees account payable activities, you may want to give him the function of approving bills or invoices before they are finally entered into the purchases record in the system. Now the problem is that, the app will have to be designed in such a way that even though that officer approves bills and invoices of suppliers, he shouldn’t be able to approve anything else (payslips, journal entries, sales invoices etc in the system).
In other words, approval previledges would have to be managed as well should such nice feature be implemented.
So Mr A may approve payslip transactions but may not be allowed to approve debit notes or sales invoices or Payment and receipts.
To finally end, One auditor asked me how we approved suppliers in the system but I told her the procedure and she wasn’t satisfied, she wanted to know if the approval could be controlled from the application. I may be an officer in the procurement department who enters Purchase Orders but my HOD should be able to approve the creation of suppliers/Vendors or the deletion of suppliers/Vendors
Interesting topic.
I support
+1