Executive Sign Off is an optional feature for your account. You may wish to use Executive Sign Off if your business requires a senior manager, business owner or director to sign off on ALL bills before they are sent to your accountancy software.
If you choose to enable Executive Sign Off you are adding another level of user (with Executive Sign Off privileges) to sign off on the bills before exporting. So if you choose to enable Executive Sign Off (see bottom of this thread) the only people that will be able to approve a bill are persons that have been given Executive Sign Off privileges.
Turning on Executive Approval
To turn on Executive Approval, in Lightyear go to your Company Settings. Under Approval Workflow, you need to select Executive Approval. Below you will then need to indicate how many executive sign-offs are required to approve all bills. The below screen grab has chosen 2 Executives to sign off however you can choose up to 3.
Remember, if you choose 2 you must then give at least 2 users the executive approval permissions.
Giving a user executive approval permissions
To set executive status for a user, go to Users, select the desired user and hit Edit. Scroll down to Permissions and check the Executive Approval tickbox.
Executive approval of bills in Review
In the scenario below this bill is awaiting two sign off's before being able to be approved. The green avatar shows that one of the Executive Approval users has signed off on it . When a second user with Executive Approval privilege signs off, the second grey avatar will also turn green.
If you choose to have 2 Executive Approvers, there will be 2 avatars displayed respectively. Hovering over the green icon shows which user is related to that particular sign off.
If an executive has already signed off on a bill, they can't act as the second or third executive approver
Finally, you can also customise that upon the last Executive Approver's sign off, have the bill auto-approve to the Signed Off tab automatically and bypassing a final Sign Off by switching on Auto Approve under Company Settings. Note, this will not record a user as having Signed Off the document via the Archive search.