Approvals and cost accounting for an agency

How an agency limits which services each office can use, holds shipments for a manager's decision, and charges every shipment to a program or fund it can report on and export.

With Industry set to Government under Manage, Settings, screens speak of offices grouped into districts, a person's home office, and Agency office for your own places in the address book. Levels such as division or bureau are set up with Mercury when you start, and Level the reports roll up to names the one your reports total by.

Set Level the reports roll up to to your agency's own level name, or reports add an extra group.

Limit what each office can use

Under Manage, Profiles, a profile sets Allowed carriers, Allowed services, Allowed package types and Allowed ship-from locations for a group of people, such as the staff at a public counter. A service outside the profile does not appear on their ship form at all.

Seeing prices is separate from shipping. People whose role does not include costs see services and arrival dates without amounts, and amounts are left out of their reports and exports too.

Hold shipments for a manager's decision

Approvals is a feature your agency uses, and the queue needs the right to decide approvals. An administrator sets the triggers under Manage, Settings, in the Approvals section. A shipment waits for a decision when it has:

• a cost over your limit,
• a declared value over your limit,
• an international destination,
• a restricted service, such as an early morning service.

No label is created while it waits. The request goes to the nearest manager who approves for that office. If nobody decides in time, a reminder goes out. After the escalation time the request moves one step up the structure to the next approver, or, if your agency chose automatic approval, it is approved at that point instead. A denial can carry a note, which the person who asked is shown. Every step is recorded in the Audit Trail. How the queue works is in Shipments that need approval.

Charge every shipment to a program or fund

Your agency names what a shipment is charged to, for example Program or Fund, and that name appears on the forms, in History and in reports. This article says program.

• When the program is the dimension that drives GL, or is marked required at ship time, a shipment without one is refused. Codes that are not on the list cannot be typed in.
• For the dimension that drives GL, each office is offered only the programs assigned to it. Other dimensions are filled in automatically, and a shipper changes them only if their role includes the right to override them.
• An item in the content catalog can carry its program, so picking it offers the right program. The shipper can change it.
• Each program can carry a GL account. Shippers never see it.
• For the dimension that drives GL, programs loaded by a cost center import in Imports wait on Pending Programs until an administrator places them with Charge them from and Release. Nobody can ship against a pending program.
• When the program dimension drives GL and has a carrier slot, a reference field under Manage, Carrier References can be filled from the program code, so it prints on every label and comes back on the carrier's invoice.

Report and export

Open Insights, Shipping Analysis, choose the date range, for example your fiscal quarter, and group by program, division, district, office, carrier, service or month. Every row opens History filtered to the shipments it counted. Export CSV exports the analysis. Where your agency uses it, GL export gives finance staff who see costs across the whole agency one line per program charge, with its GL account and amount.