Approval Workflows Configuration Overview

Use Approval Workflows Configuration to set up and configure approval workflows. Approval workflows allow you to use an approval process for Vision records, such as purchase orders and expense reports.

An approval workflow identifies the steps in an approval process, the employees who are assigned to approve a record for each step, and the notification alerts to send for each step to keep the approval process on schedule.

You can create simple approval steps or more complex, multitiered conditional steps for an approval workflow. For example, you could set up an approval workflow so that purchase orders over a certain monetary amount are routed to different approvers than a purchase order that is under a certain monetary amount.

You can set up notification alerts to be delivered by email or dashboard for each approval step. The alerts let employees know when a record is ready for their review, when it is past due, when it is approved, and so on.

You set up and configure an approval workflow for an application (record) in Configuration > Workflow > Approval Workflows. This configuration is at the Vision system level, so if you have multiple companies in Vision, you create the workflows for all your companies here. Or, you can create an approval workflow to be used by all companies. You must have the Purchasing module or the Accounting module activated in Configuration > Module Activation for Approval Workflows to display in the Configuration > Workflow menu.

Other Configuration for Approval Workflows

Enable Approvals and Assign the Approval Workflows to Use

After you create and configure an approval workflow, you turn on the use of the approval workflow for an application and specify the approval workflow it will use in the following locations in Vision:

Application	Configuration Location
Purchasing applications — Purchase Requisitions, Request for Price Quotes, Purchase Orders, Purchase Order Change Orders, and Purchase Order Releases	General tab in Configuration > Purchasing & Inventory > Company Settings
Inventory Item Requests	Inventory tab in Configuration > Purchasing & Inventory > Company Settings
Accounts Payable Vendor Invoices	General tab in Configuration > Accounting > Company AP
Employee Absence Requests	Benefit Accrual Setup tab in Configuration > Accounting > Time Analysis
Expense Reports	Setup tab in Configuration > Time & Expense > Company Expense
General Ledger Budgets	General tab in Configuration > Accounting > Company Settings

Set Up Approval Roles at the Organization Level

If you use organizations, you can set up approval roles at the organization level and assign an employee to the roles. For example, you may want purchasing records to be approved by an administrator at the organization level in addition to, or instead of, a project manager. In Configuration > Organization > General, you create approval roles for all your organizations.

In Configuration > Organization > General or Configuration > Organization > Individual, you assign approval roles to your organizations and assign one employee to an approval role. You assign these roles as approvers for approval workflow steps in Approval Workflows Configuration.

User-Initiated Workflows and Scheduled Workflows Configuration

All of the approval workflows that you enter and save in Approval Workflows Configuration are copied automatically to User Initiated Workflows Configuration and Scheduled Workflows Configuration. Here you can view the steps in more detail for troubleshooting purposes.

You can also add advanced actions, such as stored procedures, functions, custom methods, and web services, to the approval workflow steps. However, when you do this, if you ever need to edit the workflow steps again in Approval Workflows Configuration, you must complete additional steps to prevent the advanced actions from getting out of order and behaving in unexpected ways. For additional information, see the procedure for editing an approval workflow that has advanced actions added to it.