Create an Approval Workflow for an Application

You create approval workflows that will generate a review and approval process for submitted records.

You can create approval workflows for purchase requisitions, request for price quotes, purchase orders, change orders, release orders, inventory item requests, accounts payable vendor invoices, and employee absence requests.

Prerequisites: If you use organizations and you want to assign organization-level approvers to a workflow, set up approval roles at the organization level in either Settings > Organization > General or Settings > Organization > Individual in the desktop application.

To create an approval workflow for an application:

1. On the Navigation menu, click Settings > Workflow > Approval Workflows in the desktop application.
2. On the toolbar of the Approvals Configuration form, click New > New Approval Workflow.
3. On the General tab, complete the fields to select the application for which the workflow applies, give the workflow a name, assign an administrator, and so on.
4. Click the Workflow tab and on the Approval Steps grid toolbar, click Insert to add a blank row to the grid to add an approval step. You can add one or more approval steps to an approval workflow. The approval steps define the employees who can approve the record for that particular approval step, the days allotted for the approval step, and, optionally, any conditions for the step.
5. In the blank row in the Approval Steps grid, enter the information to define an approval step, including the step description, conditions (optional), employees to approve the step, review action, and so on.
6. Optional. Enter one or more conditions for an approval step. For example, you may want to enter a condition to route the approval step to different approvers if the total monetary amount of a purchase order, for example, is over a certain amount.
   1. Click in the Conditions field, click to open the Conditions dialog box, and define and save the conditions under which the step will occur.
   2. In the Action if Conditions Not Met field in the Approval Steps grid, select the action to take if the condition is not met.
7. In the Approval Steps grid, select the step that you entered, and on the toolbar of the Step Actions grid, click Insert to add an action (such as a notification alert or error message) to the approval step. For example, select Reminder to set up an alert to notify the employees who are assigned to the step that the step has not yet been approved and it is due in a certain number of days.
8. On the dialog box that opens for the type of action you selected, enter the following information:
   • For notification alerts:
     1. On the alert dialog box, select the method of notification (email or dashboard) and any other settings for the alert and click OK.

        Each email and dashboard notification alert displays in a separate row in the Step Actions grid.

     2. In the Edit Content field of the Step Actions grid, click the Email or Dashboard hyperlink.
     3. On the Email Configuration dialog box or the Dashboard Configuration dialog box, enter the settings to specify the employees to send the alert to, the alert's subject line, and its message.
     4. Click OK to save the email or dashboard configuration settings.
   • For validation error messages:
     1. On the Validate Error Conditions dialog box, add the conditions under which you want the error message to display and click OK.
     2. In the Step Actions grid, enter an error message for the action in the Description field. For example, enter a description such as "You must enter a PO amount greater than $50 before the approval process can start." Or, enter "You must enter an invoice number."
9. Repeat steps 4–8 to add additional approval steps and their actions to the workflow.
10. Use the Move Up and Move Down options on the toolbar of the Approval Steps grid to place the approval steps in the order that you want them performed.
11. Click Save on the toolbar of the Approvals Configuration form.