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Random AP Invoice workflow routing issues

Posted on by 373

Customer rolled out AP Invoice Approval workflow to ~60 GP companies with identical workflow rules and conditions. The only difference between the workflows is who receives the approval emails for the different companies.  Seemingly randomly, we are experiencing two different issues:

  1. Some workflow emails will bypass the designated approver and be sent to the workflow manager instead.  The workflow manager can recall the workflow and resubmit (with no changes to the AP invoice) and it then routes to the correct person.  The workflow manager can also delegate to the originally intended approver with no issues.  My research of the workflow tables (with a focus on WFI00002, WFI00003, and WFI00004) has yet to reveal any obvious clues about why these are being routed to the workflow manager.  We even had one company that submitted three consecutive invoices for the same vendor for approval within a 10-minute time frame.  The first one routed correctly, the second one routed to the workflow manager and the third one routed correctly.  Maddening for sure.
  2. Less common than the issue above, we occasionally will see approval emails with the email fields not populated (i.e. we only see the hard-coded text on the email template and not the document-specific details such as vendor name, description, amount, etc.).  If you hover over the email action buttons (Approve, Reject, Delegate) you can see the company and transaction-specific details that show that GP knows which transaction it is, but the email looks like a form that someone just forgot to fill out.

Having a few of these errors across 60 companies might be acceptable but the apparent randomness of them is making me nervous.  I have compared the WF setup and WF Step setup data across the companies and am as sure as I can be that they are set up correctly and the same.  I did use SQL scripts to create many of these workflows, steps, and conditions btw.  Again, the workflows work correctly 99% of the time.  Has anyone else experienced similar issues and had any luck finding the root cause.  Thanks in advance.

AW

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  • Suggested answer
    AwalshGA Profile Picture
    AwalshGA 373 on at
    RE: Random AP Invoice workflow routing issues

    Isaac,

    This is VERY helpful.  I thought I was being 'gas-lighted' by GP a few times because I simply saw no issues with the WF config, system setup, etc.  Thank you for taking the time to respond and hopefully we can get a patch/fix for this as it's a real issue for our organization.  Your feedback also helps explain how, when we recall and resubmit, the approval always seems to flow to the correct person.  We very much appreciate at least knowing we aren't just imagining things.  

    Take care,

    AW

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    Isaac Olson Profile Picture
    Isaac Olson on at
    RE: Random AP Invoice workflow routing issues

    I have actually seen similar symptoms to this and it came down the the luck of perfect timing, meaning two or more users simultaneously submit a workflow in different companies.  Some of the Workflow procedures are shared in the DYNAMICS database (especially for the email piece) like the wfAssign  and GetAssignedUsers procs.  This means all 60 of your companies would be using the same procs during their processing.  

    This is something that we recently discovered through support and development will look into whether there is a change that we can make to help avoid this in instances where users have a large number of companies in the future without having to do an overhaul and risking breaking other functionality in the process as majority of our users are on 1 or 2 company databases per DYNAMICS instance and run running into issues.

    I hope this at least helps you in knowing the probable cause as to why the issue is occurring, but at this time we do not have a workaround or ETA on a fix for this.  

    Thanks,

    Isaac Olson

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