Signing Limits in AX2012

Hi DAXers,

To control the expenditure in the organization, you can setup the spending limits for the employees to efficiently manage the expenditures by each employee in the organization. Well, most of us might already know that there is something called “Signing Limits” which is newly introduced in AX2012 can cater this requirement.

What is the configuration that is required to make signing limits working for your organization?

I would like to present a working example for you rather confining my post on explaining what these “signing limits” are. For those, who are very much new to signing limits, I suggest “Technet” is a great source which explains the concept. Below link will take you there.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh208731.aspx

I believe this practical example will let you understand the concept too.

Setting the Signing limits:

You can setup the signing limits based on either “job” or “Compensation level. For our example, I’m going ahead with “Job”. If we setup the signing limit for a “Job”, that will be applied to all the employees who are linked with the particular job.

An employee is linked with the “Job” through his “Position”. The employee “Amy” with which I have connected is linked to the job “Business Administrator”.
Image: Positions

Set the Limit basis is “Job” in your “Signing Limits Parameters” form.

Organization>Administration>Signing Limits>Signing Limits parameters

Signing Limits parameters

Go to Organization>Administration>Signing Limits>”Signing Limit policies” to set the signing limits for the required Job.

Click New to create a Signing Policy and add the Legal entity for which the signing limits is applicable to. Select the Policy rule type “Default signing Limit” and click “Create policy rule”

Image: signing Limits

Define the Signing Limit for the required Jobs. For our example I’m defining the limits for “Business Administrator” Job.

Let me define the spending limit for “purchase requisition” document type by setting the “Spending amount” as 10000 USD

Note that I’m not focusing on the “Approval amount” in this post.

Signing limit is set for all the employees who are linked to that “Job” i.e., Business Administrator.

Important note:
System will not restrict the submission of the corresponding document based on the signing limit. In our example; system will not throw an error when “Amy” tries to submit a Purchase requisition for more than 10000 USD. Signing limits work just like a property i.e., Amy’s spending limit is now set to 10000USD.

You must incorporate the Signing limits in the workflow to make it working and see the impact of your setup.

Configuring the Workflow using the “Signing limits”:

Scenario: “Contoso systems” decided the spending limit for “Business administrators” as 10000USD for the Purchase requisition and thus any Purchase requisition below USD 10K doesn’t need any approval. But, a PR which crosses USD 10K must get the approval by “X” user.

Note: I’m using the user based approval in this workflow to make it easy to understand. My coming post about “Manageral Hierarchy” will explain routing the documents to the managers based on the spending limits and approval limits.

The workflow setup must be as follows to meet this requirement:

In the above workflow, I’ve enabled the automatic actions by using preparer’s spending limit. “Purchase requisition.approval amount” returns the total amount of PRlines and if that is less than the “spending limit assigned” to the preparer, it must be approved automatically.

Double click the “Approve PR” element to assign the user to whom the system should route when if the PR amount is more than the spending limit allowed to the employee.

In the “step1” element> right click >Properties > Select Assignment
Select Assignment type “user” and in the “user tab” specify the user.
Now everything is set.

Create a PR with the amount below USD 10k and submit it, It will be approved automatically as the PR amount is less than the “spending limit” allowed for the employee.

Create another PR with the amount above USD 10k, you can notice that it will be routed to the specific user.
Note: You cannot edit the “Unit price” field in the PR, so edit the quantity to have the needed “PR amount”, alternatively, you can change the purchase price for the product in Released products.

Guys, hope you will like it. I’m sure that my next post on “Managerial Hierarchy” will be more interesting. Stay tuned for that.

Thanks for your encouraging comments. Happy Weekend!!!!