Why nothing in the payment queue is ready

LEAT shows finance staff a list of everything the organisation owes,
gathered from payroll, expense claims, staff loans and supplier invoices.

Most of the time, most of that list cannot be paid yet. This page explains
why the list shows those rows anyway, and what each reason means.

We show what we cannot pay, on purpose

It would be tidier to hide them. It would also mean a finance officer
opens an empty screen while a supplier telephones about an invoice that
was approved a fortnight ago, and has no way to tell "already paid" from
"nobody approved it" from "the screen is broken".

So everything is listed, and every row says what is standing in its way.

The commonest reason: no approval proof

This is the one that surprises people, and it is worth reading twice.

A pay run marked approved in HR, or a claim marked approved by a manager,
is that module recording a decision. It is not something the payment
system can check.

What the payment system checks is an approval proof: a cryptographic
record that named, eligible people decided this, over these exact
contents. It is issued by the approvals system, it is verified when the
payment is prepared and verified again when the batch is frozen, and
nothing stands in for it.

So "approved in HR" and "payable" are two different things, and the gap
between them is where an approval proof has to be raised.

The other reasons

• The owning module has not approved it. That decision belongs to them. Payments only pay what somebody else has decided is owed.
• There is no bank account on file. Somebody records one through the process that verifies it, out of band. It is never typed in beside the payment.
• Already paid. The owning module already shows it as settled. If it was paid outside LEAT, that is a fact recorded there rather than a payment prepared here.
• A payment for this already exists. Somebody has already prepared one. Preparing a second would pay the same thing twice, and the database refuses it. This is where you find out before building the package.
• The amount is zero or negative. A payment of nothing is not a payment, and a negative one is a refund, which is a different act needing a different approval.

Preparing from the list does not let you change anything

When you turn a row into a payment, the amount, the payee and the bank
account come from the module that owns the obligation. You choose which
obligation; you do not type the numbers.

That is not a convenience. Typing them would let a payment go out for an
amount nobody approved, or to an account nobody verified, and both of
those are how money reaches the wrong person while every control on the
screen shows green.