Approving value and initiatives

Two things in Roiva need a person's sign-off: an initiative moving from review into implementation (a spend approval), and every value entry before it counts toward ROI (a value claim). Costs don't need approving.

Where approvals wait

Inbox in the sidebar lists everything waiting on you, with a count beside it. Its Open tab is what you can decide now: each row carries Approve, and ticking several approves them together. Snoozed is what you have put off, and Done is what you have already dealt with.

Every decision already made is on Decisions, the account's ledger: the figure, the approver and the outcome as it stood at the time.

Approving a spend approval moves the initiative to Implementing, or, with an approval chain, on to the chain's next step until the last one approves. The final approval also sets the initiative's budget from the CapEx and OpEx in its business case. A Budget increase row is a revision that raised a budget above the senior approval threshold, which only the Owner can approve. See Budgets and budget vs. actual. Approving a value claim adds its amount to approved value, where it appears on the ROI dashboard, in board reports and in exports. Dispute sends a value entry back and tells whoever recorded it, or the initiative's owner for an entry a formula or an integration worked out; it can then be changed and sent again with Submit for review. Only an entry waiting for approval can be disputed. To challenge an approved one, either edit it, or choose Send Back for Review on it (in its row menu on the Value Entries tab, or on its page or side panel) and say why. Either way it goes back to the approvers and stops counting toward ROI until it's approved again. A send-back appears on Decisions as Sent back, with the reason under it.

Which value entries wait for approval

Entries a value formula or an integration works out go straight to approvers.
Value logged by hand, or by the Assistant, starts as a draft. A draft, or an entry an approver disputed, waits until someone chooses Submit for review on it.
An entry someone typed lists its Supporting documents on its page: the initiative's documents and links it cites, or None cited. It's what the figure rests on, so open them before you approve. Its row in the Inbox says how many it cites, and approving a selection together says how many of them cite none.
Saving any change to an approved entry, including the documents it cites, sends it back for approval. So does Send Back for Review, which leaves the entry alone and asks for a reason; the approvers are told the reason, and it shows on the entry. Changing, deleting or sending back an approved entry takes someone who could approve it.
Someone who edits an approved entry can't approve the change. Someone who only sends it back can approve it again, so a second pair of eyes needs a different approver to pick it up.
A spreadsheet import brings entries in as drafts, submitted for review, or approved. Only someone who could approve an entry can import it approved.

Initiatives from a spreadsheet

Initiatives created with Upload documents start at Identified or Reviewing, which need nobody's sign-off. Rows imported into Reviewing go to their approvers, who get one notification for the whole import. See Creating initiatives from documents.

Only someone who could approve an initiative can import it at a later stage, and doing so counts as their decision: the initiative shows them as its approver on the day of the import, and the decision appears under Closed in Approvals, marked as made by importing it. For anyone else, a row the sheet puts further along starts in Reviewing, where its approvers decide.

Who can approve

The initiative's approval chain. On an initiative's edit form, Approval chain names who approves it: up to five steps, approved in order, each with its own approvers. Only the approvers at the current step can approve the initiative or its value entries, whatever their role.
No chain: any Owner or Admin can approve.
Senior approval threshold: with no chain, above this amount (an initiative's planned CapEx plus OpEx, or a value entry's amount), only the Owner can approve.
Not your own entry: by default nobody approves a value entry they recorded or last edited. While there's nobody else who could approve, the rule steps aside.
Delegation: someone going on leave can hand their approvals to a colleague for a date range under Profile → Delegations.

If the Approve button is grayed out for you, one of these rules is why: hover over it to see which. Whoever they name can approve it: the current step's approvers when there's a chain, otherwise an Owner or Admin (only the Owner above the threshold), and for a value entry, not whoever recorded or last edited it.

Approval settings

An Owner or Admin sets these under Organization Settings → Approvals:

Auto-approve formula-derived value entries — off unless you turn it on. When it's on, entries calculated by a formula Roiva supplied (from a template, say) are approved automatically if they come from real readings, a person has already approved one of that formula's entries, and the amount is between half and double the last approved one. Formulas you wrote yourself, amounts above the senior approval threshold and amounts far outside the initiative's planned figures always wait for a person. Auto-approved entries show Auto-approved as their status, and each one is recorded in the audit log.
Allow people to approve entries they recorded — turns off the rule against approving your own entries.
Senior approval threshold ($) — see above. Blank means no threshold.
Approval SLA (days) — approvers get a daily reminder, in Roiva and by email, about anything that has waited longer. Blank means three days.

The initiative lifecycle — the stages an approval moves an initiative through
Adding costs and value entries — where value entries come from
How Roiva calculates value — which formula-derived entries auto-approve