Hi,
We have a sheet that have records divided into years and months, and those records have a subtable in the form that we fill in daily with different expenses we have.
I’m trying to set my financial department to get approval request whenever a new subtable entry is created. That way the finance will track, review and approve or reject daily expenses.
Is this something that can be done in post workflow or approval workflow.
Do you currently have the “expense record subtable” as a stand-alone table as well?
I suppose that you would want all the subtable entries to be approved by the Finance one by one, then it would probably make sense to have people filling in the subtable entries as New Record in the stand-alone table/form.
And since that you said the Main table is divided into Years and Months.
You can probably make a key for the main table as “YearMth”.
And the “Expense record” table (subtable entries to Main table) can use “YearMth” as the key to link to the Main table.
For example:
Main table:
YearMth (key) | Subtotal
202405 | $220
(Expense record Subtable of Main Table)
Date | User | Expense Type | Amount
2024/05/24 | UserA | Travel | $120
2024/05/24 | UserB | Travel | $100
Expense Record As a stand-alone table would look something like:
YearMth (reference key) | Date | User | Expense Type | Amount
202404 | 2024/04/15 | UserA | Travel | $80
202405 | 2024/05/24 | UserA | Travel | $120
202405 | 2024/05/24 | UserB | Travel | $100
Jeremy,
That is an interesting approach you propose. I’ll play with that and see how is will fit in our forms.
For now what I did is, I’ve set up email notifications for the finance department whenever the expense sheet is modified they get it.
Also I added a column in the subtable (only visible to finance department) and created a check field for each entry. When finance check and approve the expense, conditional formatting changes the entry to read only and in light green color. If rejected also makes it read only but red color.
The check field also comes in handy at the end of the month for statistics and reimbursements.
If you would like Approval / workflow kind of function to include both the user and finance team for each expense items, using the subtable entry as a stand-alone would give you more flexibility and control for sure.
Also, you have the option to include only “approved” expense item into the Main table and leave out rejected ones. Since that in terms of process control, it is a good idea to to seperate request and actual approved items. And once a record is approved, the record can also be locked to prevent unauthorized changes.