How to Fix duplicate timecard notifications and approval issue in Oracle Fusion Time and Labor (OTL)

In Fusion Time and Labor we came across a requirement where where every entry made on the timecard was supposed to be routed for an approval. We configured this solution by defining ‘Entry Level Approvals’ for the timecards.

Approvals at all the timecard entry levels should be completed/approved to move the time card into “Approved” status. If there are multiple approvers involved in the BPM workflow then each of the approvers must approve their corresponding entries.

While implementing this in Entry Level Approvals (ELA), we observed that multiple approvers were receiving multiple notifications for the same time card.  

Also, when both the approvers were approving their respective entries, the timecard was still remaining in Submitted status instead of moving to Approved status. Due to this issue, users' timecards were not getting approved at all.


Here's what can be done to fix this type of issues.


- Navigate to Setup and Maintenance

- In Search, look for 'Manage Task Configurations for Human Capital Management' task

- Open the task. This will take us to Business Process Management (BPM) worklist

- Search for task 'TimecardApprovalELA'

- This will show us two tasks one for Project Timecards and other for just Timecards. This is because Entry level Approvals are available for Project Costing Consumers as well as Payroll Consumers.

- Let's click on TimecardAprovalELA to edit it.

- Once opened, navigate to Notifications tab

- Click More

- Find and Check the box that says 'Don't send multiple notifications for the same human task event'

- Let's make sure Group Notification Configuration is set to 'Send Individual Emails with separate task form based on locale'

- Optionally, we can also enable 'Send task attachments with email notifications' so that attachments are sent to approvers via email

- Now, let's navigate to Configuration tab

- Scroll down and locate Task Aggregation option and set it to 'Once per task'

- Optionally, we can also configure other features of the approval such as allowing participants to route the approvals to others or allow them to edit future participants etc.

- Save and Commit the changes

With above configurations, we can fix the issue of BPM sending multiple notifications to multiple approvers when the Timecard contains multiple rows for two different assignments. 

This will also fix the issue of Timecard not getting approved even after all the underlying entries have been approved by corresponding managers.