Jan 23, 2018

The approval process is designed to require a booking to be passed by an appropriately authorised staff member for approval.  This staff member has the power to approve or cancel any booking for specific resources.

The Resource Manager

For a staff member to approve bookings they must have the security of a Resource Manager (or higher).  You can configure by editing the staff record and selecting the Resource Manager security setting.  The staff member may need to log out of Sobs and back in to pickup this updated security.

Setting up basic approvals

Approvals are allocated to individual resources, so start at the Resource management area of Sobs.  Click on ‘Resources’ in the Configuration menu.  Select a category from the list displayed to view the resources in that category.

With the resources now listed you will see a column with the heading “Approval” – this column will contain a green tick for any resources that are currently configured for approval processing.  You can edit the resource (click the ‘Edit’ link on the far right column for the selected resource) and at the end of the page you will find the ‘Approval’ checkbox – checking this box will enable approvals for this resource, unchecking it will disable approvals for this resource.

You also need to define the resource managers who will have the security to approve bookings.  With the resource listed look for the ‘Managers’ column – it will contain a short grey bar.  Click the grey bar to expand the list of managers (this will appear below the resource).  You can add managers for this resource using the ‘Add manager’ button that has now appeared in the list of managers.  When editing the resource manager options they apply as follows:

• Notify – this Resource Manager (RM) will receive an email when a staff member books this resource (or cancels a booking)
• Approve – this RM has the authority to approve or cancel pending bookings
• Loan – this RM has the authority to issue/return this resource as part of the loans module
• Edit – this RM has the authority to edit the details of this resource
• Rules – this RM has the authority to adjust these security rules and add/delete Resource Managers for this resource

Current bookings with outstanding approvals will remain in their current state, requiring approval to be processed.

Setting up approvals by security

By default Sobs will process approvals for all staff with the exception of those staff who are Resource managers of the current resource, and who also have approval security for the resource.  In the instance where you want approvals but only for certain security levels, then you can expand the current approval option to allow selection by selected security levels.

For example, you might use this if you want staff to be able to book normally but you would like ‘guest’ users to require approval processing.

1. In this case edit the Resource record as you did for basic approvals
2. Scroll to the bottom of the edit page where you will find the ‘Approval’ checkbox
3. Beside this checkbox you should see a small green “+” icon, click this to expand the selection
4. You should now see a list of security values with check-boxes next to each security.
5. Check the boxes for each security level that you want the approval process to apply to
6. Now click the ‘Save’ button to save these settings
7. The resource is now displayed with approval column showing the selected security levels

If you don’t check any security levels for approval processing the system will operate as though no approval is required.