Administrative professionals have an ethical duty to ensure they act in a professional manner in all aspects of their business transactions.  This means administrators should uphold integrity and high standards when carrying out fiduciary responsibilities.  If an error is identified, it should be reviewed, resolved, and reported immediately.

As the Administrative Coordinator for a research company that invests in post-secondary research, you coordinate tasks on behalf of your immediate supervisor, the Manager of Operations.  Several of your critical tasks include budgeting, hiring, credit card reconciliation, expense reporting, and payroll.  

You are aware budgets are critical projections of how much revenue a company expects to receive during the upcoming year and as a result, managers depend on these figures for decision-making.   To maintain the wealth and health of a company, these projections should be as accurate as possible, since inaccurate projections can cause issues with daily operations of a business, especially if the actual revenue and costs fall short of the projections.

Your boss approaches you and thanks you for putting an excellent budget together over the past few months.  She is excited about hiring the two new administrative assistants you added to the budget for a total of $80,000.00 per year and wants you to hire the two assistants you recommended.  As a bonus, you boosted the revenue by $100,000.00 on the budget to fund the two new assistant positions.

A few weeks later, you have welcomed the two assistants to their first day of work, and you have already assigned their first task – order new desks and office supplies using the P.O. process.  What a fantastic learning experience for everyone!

At lunch (which you purchased from P.C. for your new staffers), you receive a call from Human Resources indicating the two new assistants you hired are not authorized and need to be terminated immediately.  You are absolutely shocked to hear this!  You tell HR that you budgeted for your new assistants, so everything is fine. 

Question:

Explain the approvals required in the budget process.