Microsoft Dynamics GP Workflow: ‘If condition is not met’ Explained.

Recently I have been seeing an uptick of support cases where the ‘If the Condition is not met:’ setting is being used improperly.  When this setting is misused, it can lead to performance issues when submitting and approving workflows, routing/email issues to unexpected approvers, and excessive SYSTEM approved ‘No Action Needed’ lines in workflow history.

Once you have a good understanding of the difference between choosing ‘End Workflow Path’ and ‘Continue to the next step’, then creating streamlined workflows gets way easier. 

This isn’t the easiest feature to just read about and understand so I wanted to help demonstrate with some diagrams and a short video on how this works. 

You will find these options under each Workflow Step. 

When you click Submit, every 1^st step is checked by the system VERTICALLY.  This is action is independent of the ‘If the condition is not met:’ setting.  In my example below, you can see that I have two 1^st Steps highlighted (Manual Payments & PM Transactions).  Both of these 1^st steps will be checked first regardless of whether I have my If Condition is not met:  set to ‘End Workflow Path’ or ‘Continue to Next Step’. 

The If the Condition is not met: setting controls whether you want the workflow to continue to progress HORIZONALLY inside it’s workflow path.  In my example below, if I had selected ‘Continue to Next Step’, then even if my first steps for Manual Payments and PM Transactions are not met, GP is going to still keep checking the steps HORIZONALLY within the workflow.  In most cases, this is redundant.  If my first Manual Payments step was false, I don’t need to check if it’s a Manual Payment batch that is over 10k or over 1M because I already know its not a Manual Payment batch.  In most cases, using the ‘Continue to Next Step’ makes the system check more steps than it needs to, slows down your workflow, and creates unnecessary SYSTEM approved workflow history records.       

A common misconception or myth is that users often think that the ‘continue to next step’ is required to go backwards (Vertically) to their other 1^st Steps.  This is not true, the If the Condition is not met: setting only drives HORIZONAL movement within the workflow path, and does not drive any movement outside of its path (BACKWARDS). 

In majority of situations where you have multiple first steps (vertically aligned), you want to select the If the Condition is not met: setting of ‘End Workflow Path’.  If you are unsure which one to pick, always start with ‘End Workflow Path’ as it will give you the most streamlined and performant workflow.  There are rare occasions where the ‘Continue to next step’ can be used which is why we have the option, but I see this setting misused more often than not. 

Again, this is a difficult setting to write about so I have also created the video below to help demonstrate how this setting works and how the workflow will react based on which settings that you choose. 

For more Videos and Tips check out the 'Are you "ON TOP" of your game when it comes to Microsoft Dynamics GP?' Blog Post.  

For more documentation on Workflow check out Workflow condition management on our Microsoft Dynamics GP Docs site. 

I hope you find this helpful!  If you have any questions or there are more features that like this that you would like our Support Team to create videos or blogs on please let us know in the comments and we can consider them in a future series!  

Isaac Olson

Support Escalation Engineer 

Microsoft Dynamics GP