Creating a Workflow Approval for Purchase Orders

One of the most common business requirements nowadays is to ensure that specific critical transactions in the company are reviewed and approved in the ERP system electronically, without the need to print and manually sign each paper. The paper-based approval system is becoming old fashioned and tradition as the business market evolve.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central, workflow management is quite comprehensive and provides a variety of powerful features. In today’s post we will be explaining on a step by step basis how to create a purchase order wofklow

Workflow Templates

Before creating a workflow from scratch, it is very important to take a look at the existing standard workflow templates prvodied by Microsoft. These are non-editable worfklows, the code for the microsoft workflow templates always starts with ( MS-).

Here is a list of the pre-defined list of templates:

When creating a new workflow, you have one of two options as illustrated in the screen shot below:

It is way effeicient to pick an existing workflow template, this will populate the general steps, conditions and responses and you can modify by adding or deleting according to the business needs.

Workflow | Understanding the Main Components 

There are primarily three very important components to consider when creating a workflow, these three components represnets the lgoic of any business policy which is required to be impleneted, these three components are:

1. Event
2. Conditions
3. Response

As the screen shot above illustrates, these three components are structured under the workflow steps.

Workflow Steps Logical Sequence

Among all the steps, you can define the “Entry Point” which basically starts the workflow, along which there is an to increase or decrease the indent of the step.

There is a predefined list of events and responses for every workflow type, from which you have to choose in order to fulfill the business scenario.

Approval Users

It is a prerequisite to define the approval users, which can be done on the “Approval User Setup” page.

As illustrated below, a user can be configured to have unlimited purchase, request or sales approval. In addition, a user could be linked to a specifci approver ID, for which approvals will be directed when submited.

In the example above, ERPSupport is setup to have “Unlimited Purchase Approval” which “ERPDev” is setup to submit their approvals to the “ERP Support User” for testing pueposes.

Notification Setup

Notifications are configured on the “Approval User Setup” window, click on “Notification Setup” and configure the following:

• Notification Type ( Approval, new record, overdue)
• Notification Method ( Email or Note)
• Schedule (Instantly, Daily, Weekly or Monthly)

Enabling Workflow 

The last step to be done is to click on the “Enabled” option for the workflow on the main workflow window, this will enable the workflow on the selected window. In our case, once we enable the purchase order approval, any new PO will have to be submitted for approval before any further process.

Submitting Purchase Orders for Approval 

As illustrated in the screen shot below, after enabling the workflow, any order has to be submitted for apprvoal by clicking on “Request for approval” > “Send Approval Request”.

Upon submitted, the approver will be have a notification on their home page to check pending approvals, along with several actions including:

• Approve
• Reject
• Delegate to another user
• Open record to navigate tot he PO detail

Best Regards
Mahmoud M. AlSaadi