Approval chains and the approval matrix
The approval matrix decides who signs off what. Leave requests, expense claims, attendance corrections, profile changes and new employees all route through it.
Where: My Team › Settings › Approvals & Access You need: the Team organisation right; new employee approvers needs the employee create right
Set this up before you invite anyone
Approvals are the piece most often left until after people start using KAMI, and that is the wrong order. Requests raised before there is a route to send them do not disappear — they sit unapproved, and someone has to go back and clear them.
Build the matrix once your organisation structure exists, because approval routes are usually defined against departments and branches.
What routes through the matrix
The matrix covers requests across modules, including:
- Leave requests
- Expense claims
- Attendance corrections
- Employee profile changes
Each can have its own route, so the person who approves a day off need not be the person who approves a bank-detail change.
New employee approvers
Adding an employee is handled separately, under New Employee Approvers, because it is a different decision from approving a request from someone already employed.
Whoever is set here receives new profile requests, and their approval is what turns a created profile into an active employee. If profiles are being created but nobody is completing the setup, this is the first thing to check.
Approvers see their queue on the dashboard
Anything awaiting a decision appears on that person's My Team dashboard, and the tab shows a count of what they personally can act on. So an approver who says they were never told has, in practice, a number sitting on their dashboard.
This is worth explaining when you set someone up as an approver — the queue is not emailed at them, it waits for them.
When a request is stuck
Requests stall for a small number of reasons. In the order worth checking:
- Is there a route at all? A request type with no configured approver has nowhere
to go.
- Does the approver still work here? Approvals pointed at someone who has left are
the most common cause. Deactivating an employee does not reassign what they were due to approve.
- Is the employee placed correctly? Routes usually key off department or branch. Someone
in the wrong department routes to the wrong approver — or to none.
- Does the approver have the right? Being named as approver and having permission to
act are two different things — see User rights and access control.
Before someone leaves
The approval matrix is the thing most often forgotten in offboarding. Reassign anything an approver is responsible for before deactivating them, rather than discovering the gap when requests start piling up.
It is worth a periodic check that every route points at somebody who still works here.