6. Getting a Fee Estimate Approved

Although this was briefly mentioned in the "Building a Fee Estimate" section, this area explains how a Fee Estimate gets Approved in more detail

To request approval of a fee estimate, you need to add the required approver(s) via the View/Set Approvers button. Ultimately, you only need approval from a Finance Admin user with an appropriate approval range.

Step 1: When in the Fee Estimator tab, click the View/Set Approvers button on the top right hand side of the screen.

Step 2: Type the name of your preferred approver in the Approvers box and Click Add.

NOTE: When adding approvers via the View/Set Approvers form, the drop down list of departments is purely there to limit the search for approvers to people within the selected departments. You DO NOT need to invite an approver from every department.

An email will then be sent to your approver, asking them to Approve or Reject the Fee Estimate for your Project.

As each approver approves the fee estimate, CMAP checks to see if all of the invited approvers have granted approval. If they have, CMAP triggers the next stage which is to automatically email all Finance Admin users for the relevant office that have a budget approval range that covers the value of the project in question.
For example, if your project is worth $50,000 and one Finance Admin has a range of $0 to $25,000 and two others have a range of $0 to $75,000, the two with the higher range will receive the email requesting ultimate approval but the one with the lower range will not as they can’t approve budgets that high. On that note, it’s worth having at least one finance admin user with a huge range to ensure all possibilities are covered e.g. $0 to $100 million.

Once any of the invited Finance Admins have approved the fee estimate, CMAP will automatically send an email to the Project Manager confirming that approval has been received and notifying them that the Win the Project button is now enabled.

At any point, a finance admin with the appropriate range can go into the fee estimate and approve it. If they do this, the Win the Project button will be enabled regardless of whether or not the invited approvers have approved the fee estimate yet.