Workflow for sales documents

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Posted on by Tanner

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I've attempted to setup the workflow for my client, so that Employee A can create an invoice and send it for approval, and then Employee B will see it in their pending approvals and have to approve it before Employee A can continue processing it. However, I've tried multiple methods of setting it up, and when Employee A submits for approval, the document seems to become immediately approved without needing intervention from Employee B. It's almost as if Employee A has unlimited approval rights. My Approval User Setup is as follows.

Does anyone know what changes I need to make or what I am missing to get the approval workflow to work correctly?

Thank you,

Tanner

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Tammy Torgerson on at

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Hello Tanner,

Thank you for the explanation of what you are trying to accomplish, as well as what you have experienced, and the supporting screen shot.

I am expecting that you are using the default template values for the Sales Invoice Approval Workflow, where you can drill down on the "Approval of a sales document is requested.: (+) Add record restriction." and then drill down on "Create an approval request for the record using approver type Salesperson/Purchaser and approver limit...", to see the options that look like this:

When the Approver Type is set to Salesperson/Purchaser, the expectation is that someone other than the salesperson for this invoice is entering the transaction and that the salesperson is the one who will approve the newly entered invoice. This means that if your user SHEILA is not a salesperson, but is a data entry person and enters the Invoice for salesperson NW, then that newly entered Invoice would need to be approved by WHIT before further processing could occur. However, it appears that SHEILA a salesperson as well and is entering an invoice with the salesperson value of TT. The Invoices for salesperson TT would route to SHEILA. Since she entered the invoice we make the assumption that she knows what she is doing (in the data entry) and automatically approves the Invoice. I can see where this is unexpected, but this choice of Approver Type = Salesperson simply routes the approval to the salesperson recorded on the Invoice--regardless of the approval limits. You can read about this in the related Dynamics NAV documentation, here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh879087(v=nav.90).aspx.

The functionality that you are expecting can more closely be accomplished by changing the Approver Type to Approver. This will disregard the salesperson on the transaction and instead first determine which user submitted the request and then the approver assigned to that user according to the Approval User Setup.

Please let me know what further questions you may have on this topic.

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Chris Bulson on at

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Hello,

Have you tried using the 'Set up approval workflows' walk-through on the 'Assisted Setup' window?

Otherwise I would recommend looking at the following documentation:

msdn.microsoft.com/.../dn892112(v=nav.90).aspx

Thanks,

Chris

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Soren Groes-Petersen on at

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FYI, the advanced Workflow setup documentation will be added to the Financials help library within two updates.

Link to the latest help for Workflow functionality: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/across-workflow

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Tanner 360 on at

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Tammy,

Thank you for your thorough response as always. I understand the logic and what the two Approver Types mean now. I have switched it to "Approver" and requested that the client test to verify it's working as we expect now. I'm marking this as answered because I believe it will be resolved, but if I have further questions I will reach out.

Thank you again for all your help.

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Tanner 360 on at

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Tammy,

Your suggestion worked perfectly to get the workflow to follow the Approval User Setup. However, I'm taking this a step further and wondering if you can assist. Screenshots are included, I'll explain how it's working and how I want it to work. To start, here is the approval user setup again.

Currently, if SARAH creates an invoice and submits it for approval, then WHITT will get a notification e-mail and can go in and approve the document. Then, WHITT gets a second notification e-mail that the document has been approved. At this point the document is approved and restriction has been removed.

What I would like to happen, is if Sarah creates an invoice and submits for approval, then WHITT would get a notification e-mail of the pending doc, and he can go in and approve it. At this point I'd like the document restriction to remain. Then I'd like SHEILA to get a notification e-mail for the pending approval, and she can go in and do the final approval. Once she has approved, the document restriction ends, and the document is approved and ready to post. I'd also like the final notification e-mail stating that the document is approved to go to SARAH or whoever created the invoice, rather than going to WHITT or the person who approved the invoice. The requester is the one who will continue processing and needs to know it's approved, the approver already knows it's approved because they just approved it, so makes no sense for them to get the notification.

Here is how my workflow responses are currently setup:

If you need any further information, please inquire. I hope this is possible as they would like each consultant to be forced to view the invoice and verify any lines related to them before the processor can continue posting and sending the invoice.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Tanner

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Tanner 360 on at

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I've changed the verified answer to "rejected" because I haven't gotten any responses in a while and thought that might be the reason why. Although Tammy's answer helped immensely, we are still not getting it to function as desired. Please see my comment above for the issue. Also, if changing the answer to "rejected" was not the right move, please advise and I'll change it back as you did, in fact, answer my original question.

Thank you.

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Tammy Torgerson on at

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Hi Tanner,

Thank you for these further questions, as well as the explanation of what you are seeing along with the desired results.

I have set up my Approval User and Workflow to match what you included in your screen shots. I am getting similar results--up to a point. I'm my testing, SARAH creates the invoice and submits for approval. WHITT receives the notification email that the invoice "requires your approval". WHITT signs in and approves the invoice. This is where I have some different results.

When the Invoice was originally submitted by SARAH, opening the Approval Entries page for the Invoice actually showed three lines for this invoice. The first line was for SARAH which showed as approved. The next line was for WHITT which showed as Open until he approved, when the Status changed to Approved. The third line is for SHEILA and shows a status of Created until after WHITT approves--when it changes to Open.

Also, when WHITT approves, SHEILA does get an email stating that the invoice "requires your approval". This is different from what you were seeing. Here are questions that I have:

1. After SARAH submits the invoice for approval, have her click on the Approval button to open the Approval Entries page. How many rows are listed? Do they match what I mentioned above? I am guessing that you may have an entry for WHITT and not one for SHEILA--based on the fact that the record restriction is removed after WHITT approves.

2. If you have records in Approval Entries for both WHITT and SHEILA, then the approval by WHITT should drop you into the Workflow Step "An approval request is approved." with the Condition: "Pending Approvals: >0". Does this step in your workflow still look like this:

3. In order to ensure that WHITT and SHEILA received the email notifications, I did have to check the Notification Setup for each of the users. Do this by opening the Approval User Setup page and then for each user clicking on the Notification Setup. Ensure that you have records for both the New Record and Approval Notification Types. For both records, the Notification Method should be "Email", Schedule should be "Instantly", and Display Target should be "Web".

Based on my tests, it should be possible for both WHITT and then later SHEILA to get the notification emails that the invoice "requires your approval".

However, the last piece where you would like the original requester to get the email about the final approval is not possible at this time. The design of the workflow doesn't support this, although I completely understand where you are coming from. It is possible to have a specific (named) user notified of the approval, but not possible to select the "original requester". Here is an example of the approval step "An approval request is approved" with the Condition: "Pending Approvals: 0" where I send a notification to the TTORGERS user who is the equivalent of SARAH in your example:

Can you please log a suggestion on our ideas page to request functionality to add a Response that will "Create a notification for" the Sender ID or original requester? Here is the Ideas page: https://ideas.dynamics.com/ideas/dynamics-financials

Please let me know how this goes for you and if you are able to get closer to the desired outcome, even though sending to the original requester is not possible at this time.

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Tanner 360 on at

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Tammy,

Thank you again for the quick reply and excellent explanation. I've tested and made a few changes, here is what I found:

Sarah submitted a new invoice and it looked exactly like you mentioned you were seeing, 3 lines, hers was approved, Whitt was Open, and Sheila was Created. The step you mentioned in the workflow for "an approval request is approved" also matches how our system is setup, so no issue there.

The differences I found were in the notification setup. SARAH was set up with the Approval notification type, but not for New Record. Whitt and Sheila were both set up for New Record, but not for Approval. I've changed it so all 3 are set up to receive e-mail instantly via web for both New Record as well as Approval. So thank you for pointing that out, I definitely missed it.

Another stupid thing I missed was the e-mail address in the Approval User Setup, for Sheila I forgot the ".com" at the end of the e-mail, so I'm sure that's why I wasn't getting notifications even if the notification setup would have been correct.

It's fine that you can't choose "original requester" because as long as it's possible to designate a named user, that will be sufficient for now. I will still put in the idea request as you suggested as I believe it is good functionality to add.

To conclude, I've had SARAH submit another invoice for approval, WHITT should get the notification as he already was before, and he can go approve it. After that, we'll see if it notifies me and if I'm able to approve it before the document is released for further processing. I will update this thread today or tomorrow with my results.

Thank you again for all your help and thorough explanations!

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Tanner 360 on at

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Tammy,

After testing, it appears everything is now working as expected. Maybe it always was and I just wasn't getting the notification because I was missing that piece. In any case, Sarah created an invoice, Whitt got the notification and went to approve, then Sheila (me) got the notification and I was able to approve. Once I approved, Sarah was able to go back in and post and send the invoice. All worked perfectly.

The only thing left to test is the final notification to the named user once all approvals are complete. I set this up as you described and named SARAH, so we'll see if she gets the notification. I'm not too worried though as I expect it to work fine.

Thanks again for all the help, I've gone back and verified your answers. I've also submitted to the IDEAS page as you suggested, so hopefully that functionality shows up in the future.

Thank you!

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