Salesforce really shines when it comes to automation. Approval Processes are one of these automations!
Approval processes take a record and based upon a certain set of criteria, have you submit the record for approval to a manager or higher up.
Example: You are a salesperson at EZ cheese. You are selling a truckload of EZ cheese and will give your customer a bulk discount. This discount is around 15%. However, your company requires any discount over 10% to be approved a manager.
This is where the Approval Process comes in.
Shameless plug. I have a video on this specific scenario over on the Salesforce Emily Youtube channel. I will embed it here if you want this in video form.
Overview of Approval Processes
Now that we’ve laid the groundwork let’s get into the technical side of approval processes.
You’ll start with info and entry criteria. This is the beginning of the approval process or the why of the approval process.
If you’re submitting an approval process for an opportunity discount. This is where you specify the entry criteria or the discount amount to submit the opportunity for.
After these have been specified. You will be able to start submitting records for approval! YAY!
Next, you’ll need to add all the bells and whistles to your process. These are called initial submission actions, approval steps, final approval actions, final rejection actions, and recall actions.
These allow you to perform certain automation within the actions of the approval process.
Typically the automation includes:
- Field Update
- Outbound Message
- Email Alert
- Create a Task
P.S. these are the same as workflow actions
Approval Process information and Criteria
Now that we’ve laid the groundwork let’s get into the technical side of approval processes.
Approval Processes start with information and criteria. The information includes the name, api name, email template, and a few other fields.
See the screenshot below of an opportunity approval process using the jump start wizard.
Next, you’ll need to input the criteria. This can be done in two ways.
First, using criteria which is likely going to be a single criterion or multiple using an and statement.
See screenshot:
Second, you could use a formula. This is used for more complex entry criteria. This could use a number of different or use an OR statement instead of an AND statement.
Approver Settings
So now that we have the first part of the approval process played out. Next, we go into approver settings. Typically the approver of the submitted record will be the submitter’s manager.
However, you can choose to be another user. Such as the director of finance, or the deal desk user.
Another thing to note is if you are going to make this a unanimous approval process, you would do that here.
We will touch on the types of approval processes later on in this post. However, unanimous approval processes are when you have two or more approvers that both need to ‘say yes’ to the record being approved.
Initial Submission Actions
So, when you submit a record for approval one thing will always happen. This is that the record will lock for editing until it has been approved or rejected.
Next, you’ll need to create the actions! Yay! I personally love this part. Also, people find actions like the ones I’m about to layout VERY helpful. And will sometimes expect them.
The types of actions that you can use are:
- Field Update
- Outbound Message
- Email Alert
- Create a Task
Although, I specifically recommend that you use two email alerts and any messages or field updates that are situationally appropriate.
The two email alerts are one to the approver to let them know they have a record waiting for them. And one for the submitter to let them know that their record was successfully submitted.
If your company has an SLA for approved records it would be helpful to note this in the emails.
Approval Steps
Next, we move on to the approval steps. Approval steps are different crietria that your record could go through in order to be approved.
Here’s what Salesforce has to say about approval steps:
“Approval steps define the chain of approval for a particular approval process. Each step determines which records can advance to that step, who to assign approval requests to, and whether to let each approver’s delegate respond to the requests. The first step specifies what to do if a record doesn’t advance to that step. Later steps specify what happens if an approver rejects the request.”
Link to further documentation.
So here’s an example. Let’s imagine that we have one approval process for discounts in salesforce. However, depending on the market the opportunity is in we would need to have more people approve a bigger discount.
In this example, we have two markets. Small-cap and Large Cap. If our small-cap has a 15% discount only the manager needs to approve. If we have a large-cap opportunity with a 15% discount the manager and their manager would need to approve.
Final Approval Actions
Next, let’s move on to Final Approval actions. These happen when you have a record that gets approved. Automatically the record is unlocked from an editing stand point.
So these actions are going to be the same four that we had in the initial submission actions.
- Field Update
- Outbound Message
- Email Alert
- Create a Task
I highly recommend that you create one email alert to the record owner to let them know that their record has been aproved.
Final Rejection Actions
Next, we have final rejection actions. These are nearly identical to final approval actions, just the record is rejected. So the same four actions and the record unlocks.
- Field Update
- Outbound Message
- Email Alert
- Create a Task
Here it’s super helpful to create a task instead of an email or in conjunction with an email.
This task should be related to the reason it was returned.
So with our example of discounts, if the discount is rejected then we should have a task to lower the discount and follow up with the manager or person who rejected it.
Recall Actions
Now we have recall actions. This occurs when a record is removed from the approval process without being approved or rejected.
By default, the record will be able to be editable.
The recall actions are the same four we’ve discussed.
- Field Update
- Outbound Message
- Email Alert
- Create a Task
Types of Approval Processes
There are a few types of approval processes in salesforce. Some you can do declaratively and others that you can do programmatically. Let’s cover these.
Regular approval process: This is an approval process that has a singular approver or multiple approvers but only one person needs to approve it.
Unanimous Approval Process: This means there is more than one approver and both need to say yes to the record.
Dynamic Approval Process: This is a complicated routing of the record that needs to be approved. This is done programmatically and needs a developer to do.
Conclusion
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