How to avoid that 1 person approves an invoice multiple times in SAP Cloud

[hmoustaqimi]

Dear SAP community,

When we create a supplier invoice, the invoice will go through our approval flow for approval. This approval flow means that 1, 2 or 3 people need to approve before the invoice is released for payment.

However, we noticed with several invoices that 1 person approves an invoice twice because for example when he is assigned as first approver and he is set up as substitute for the person, who normally approves in the second step, or another example, when an invoice is forwarded to another approver when this other approver is later also a part of the approval flow.

With this fact, the purpose of getting the invoice(s) verified by multiple persons disappears.

Can you please inform us what are the possibilities in SAP to avoid that 1 person approves an invoice multiple times?

For example giving a blocking message to the person who is approving the invoice for a second time, telling him that he can not approve this invoice for a second time and that he needs to forward the invoice to another person for approval.

Thank you in advance for your help,

Best regards,

Hiba

[mira_heilmannn · Accepted solution]

Dear Hiba,

I assume you are referring to Flexible Workflow for Supplier Invoices, right?

On this specific scenario, I am not an expert, but checking out this documentation, there seems to be a way using the BAdI MRM_WF_EXCLUDE_AGENTS. One of the importing parameters is a table of all previous approvers and you can export a list of excluded agents. So implement the BAdI and set "Exclude Restricted Agents Determined by BAdI" for the step in Manage Workflows (as described in the linked documentation) and your issue should be fixed also for the forwarding and substitution use case.

Please let us know if this helps!

Best regards,

Mira

[Cora_Phelan · Accepted solution]

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[Yasin]

suppose you have 3 levels, when person 1 level 1 approve the invoice the approve button should be disabled he cannot click any more.

one more consideration is related to SAP authorization (Basis), each approver / each level should have different Auth Code assigned to the each person so no can approve anything not related to his level (no access)