Question regarding how to use AD to manage expense report approval hierarchy

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Posted on by Douglas Steinschneider

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We are setting up new Windows 2012 R2 servers. Management wants to implement a hierarchy for expense report approvals. Our GP partner doesn't seem to know much about how you set up a hierarchy of OU's to accommodate the scenario where sales rep A must be approved by manager B who in turn is approved by manager C. I'm not familiar with GP 2015 (sold Great Plains in the 80's but moved on to concentrate on CRM). What's odd is I'm good at internet search but can't find anything about using workflow in conjunction with AD to manage a hierarchy of expense report approvals in Dynamics Great Plains. If anyone could point me to either a knowledgebase, blog or article on this I would much appreciate it.

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Beat Bucher GP Gee... 28,021 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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RE: Question regarding how to use AD to manage expense report approval hierarchy

Thank you Jothikrishnan,

I'll have a look at the AD structure and talk to IT about the levels ... need to figure out how this works. Not much documentation around this... sigh..
Jothi Krishnan N 1,865 on at

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RE: Question regarding how to use AD to manage expense report approval hierarchy

I dint explore this much and also not using it, but I can see when you create the Step that there is a 3rd option "Assign To : Number of Levels" under the selection type "Hierarchy" and you can enter the number in the box and that should take care of your scenario if you have the AD levels set up correctly I guess. it allows to enter max 99 so i guess it will allow that many levels.
Beat Bucher GP Gee... 28,021 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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RE: Question regarding how to use AD to manage expense report approval hierarchy

Hi Douglas,

Yes there is unfortunately not much documentation around for the new WF 2.0 process ... We're currently using GP 2010 together with Business Portal 5.0 and the approval is managed inside BP for all the employee's expenses and time-sheet reports... There is no tool currently available from Microsoft to "transition" between BP and WF 2.0. This is very sad because many companies using Project Accounting will have to make the jump one day or the other as BP will be deprecated and no longer supporter starting with GP 2015. In order to replace your BP TS & EE report approval, you need to convert also your BP user licenses against the new ESS license type that came with GP 2015R2... another headache that will not necessarily please all the IT managers..

I'm too looking for a "multi-level" approval option for the PA TS & EE reports, as prior to WF 2.0 there were only 2 levels you could define in PDK (Personal Data Keeper) for supervisors & managers to approve the submitted documents. With WF 2.0 I was hoping to find a solution that would help in the case of 'out-of-office' or vacation situations.

My understanding was that initially Microsoft claimed the approval hierarchy would be driven by the AD setup, but in our case it doesn't necessarily fit all the department's organization, as in certain cases some employees may require approval from a different person than their direct report.

How did deal with that in WF 2.0 ? can you share some examples of employee - supervisor - manager setup ?

Thanks in advance for your input.
Douglas Steinschneider 235 on at

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RE: Question regarding how to use AD to manage expense report approval hierarchy

Just watched www.youtube.com/watch which explains how workflow uses "direct managers" and "skip-level managers". I saw how the approval can be done outside GP using and email that contains a link.

I now understand that the twist for our scenario is that some of the gp users require up to four levels of approval rather than just one manager above them. We are being told to setup nested OU's to accomplish this but haven't found any documentation about how to do this.