Setting up an approval workflow streamlines your business operations, ensuring key stakeholders are kept in the loop for critical actions, namely sales and production order approval.
In other words, when you set up an approval workflow, sales and production orders will first need to be approved by employees high up in the hierarchical chain before they go through.
Here are the steps to setting up an approval workflow:
How to Set Up an Approval Workflow
To set up a workflow, open the approval settings and select the type of approval you want to create, which could be internal or external. After that, select the document category, which could be sales or production orders.
Next, the document needed for the approval to go through, without which the approval request might be rejected.
Finally, select the approver. As an added step, decide if you want to allow orders to be confirmed without approval. If checked, it means an employee can confirm an order even if the request isn't approved.
In the example above, two employees were set as approvers. When someone tries to create an order and seeks approval, both employees will get an approval request email, which they can approve, request changes, or outrightly reject.
The workflow for requesting changes or outright rejection is illustrated below:
Note that the entire approval workflow can also be triggered from the document section of an order.
What Is the Difference Between External and Internal Approvals?
As you might have guessed, the internal approval workflow is meant for your team. Meaning only registered users can answer an approval request. However, they don't have to log into the system to attend to an approval request.
External approval workflow, on the other hand, is meant for customers, vendors, and business partners.
They don't need to have an account or log in to approve a request. All they need is a working email.
Here's an illustration of how external approval works:
In this setup, the buyer contact was set as the approver. When an order is created, whoever is set as the buyer contact will receive the approval email and can approve, reject, or request changes without logging in.
FAQs
What happens when you set up both internal and external approval for the same document category?
Put simply, both parties involved will need to approve for the order to be confirmed. For example, if you create an internal workflow and set A as the approver and B as the approver for external, both will need to approve before the order can be confirmed.
Does the same logic apply to production orders as well? Yes, it does.