116 - Approvals in Dynamics NAV 2018 Pt. 5

Approvals in Dynamics NAV 2018 Pt. 5   

We keep going on approvals, a big topic like I said before, so there's gonna be several videos on this. So today we are actually gonna go into the workflows.

Approval user setup
What we sort of talked about before just to get into that quickly is the user actually, approval user setup, there is a lot of settings here which are important, this sort of gives us the approval chain, the limits, and things like that, email and all that. But what really drives the approval thing is something called workflows. I am going to take a look at that quickly

Create a workflow
If I go in here into workflows, and this is relatively new for NAV, we didn't have workflow setup like this before, here I have a list of workflow I have enabled in the system and I have 2 workflows, I have the Sales Order Approval Workflow and the Purchase Order Workflow. I’ve actually been using the sale order approval workflow for the past few videos, we’ve been going through sales order, talking about the emails and the limits and the approval chain and all of those things.

But we can have a lot more workflows than these, and workflows are fairly dynamic, you can actually do all sort of things, So what I’m gonna do is create a new workflow. All I have to do is go up here, new workflow template, and I recommend if you are paying around with this for the first time, create a workflow from templates, actually creating from scratch gets confusing, but from the template at least you have the basic setup of how a process should work.

I’m gonna go ahead here into sales and marketing, we have something called item approval workflow, so usually we are approving documents like sales orders, purchase orders, things like that but an interesting addition now is that we can actually approve entities like customer, vendor, item and things like that, unit price change a lot of interesting things here.

Item approval
And I’m gonna add the item approval, which means that if somebody creates an Item I want them to send an approval for that item, someone has to look it over, either approve, reject, do comments etc. So, it's on the item cart I just hit ok and then it automatically copies in all of the steps.

This screen here is important, this is an item approval workflow that is created from a template so there is a template in the system that has all of these steps and now it created this workflow for us. Here it's describing all of the steps that it goes through as its going through the approval process.

This case just briefly explains what's going on. First we have on the event approval of an item is requested, which means you item card , then you say send approval request, then indented we have all of the things that happened, if the approval request is approved, what happens if the approval request is proved with more than one pending approvals, so it could be sent to a group, then what happens if rejected, what happens council and delegated.

Also when you actually send this, what happens is this, and I’m just gonna quickly get into this. It restricts the item, creates an approval request for direct approver; its a lot of words here that you are, ok what does that really mean?; and send the approval request to the record and create a notification, so quite a few things. I’m not gonna dive in detail now in this, I’m just gonna go into the item and show you how that works on an entity, at least for this video and then we can kind of go ahead more into the workflow and change it around.

Send approval request
So I’ve created this, one thing I forgot to do, I, of course, need to enable it, it comes un-enabled or disabled so that it doesn't really go and if you check this if it actually starts working; let me go ahead and go into Paul, I go into item and I’m gonna go ahead and create a new item and I get the template for items, I’m just gonna create a retail item It comes up here, the new item is 70,062, I’ll call it 2018 special coffee cup.

I’m not gonna do anything more over here, obviously I could do more, but I’m just gonna go ahead and send an approval request, right now we have approval on the entity which is nice, So I send the approval request, approval request has been sent. Now where does it go?, I know you probably kind of heard when I was saying it goes to direct approver, it means that its the next approver in the chain, it doesn't go up all the chain because there is no value on the item card, so it can go through validation steps so basically it just goes to the next approver in the chain for this, which in this case it Demo.

Let me go ahead and take a look at Demo, this is my demo account, and I am just going to go ahead and look at approval request ; doesn't matter which one I get into; so I can see here we have the latest that sent here was an Item set for approval, so this approval request entries actually have all the request entries that have been sent to the user.

I can see here that I have this item 78,062 coming in to be requested and I have to take a look at that and which these approvals there isn’t like pending approval on the documents like for sales order like a tile or something like that, because this is fairly generic so you have to get into approval request entries and take a look at it there, obviously they’ve created a nicer screen for this but they are here.

Another thing is that it sends an email, so as you can see here there is an email for Demo saying this item requires your approval and you can click on the item here in approval of course. So let's go back into the approval request, I don't have to approve right here, it's kind of interesting, can't do that, I have to go into the record and here it is, and I can hit approve, reject or delegate. So I approve it and now this coffee cart is approved.

Restrict the record
One thing that I notice going through this as I was playing around is that the restrict record that comes in, so technically when you send a request for an approval its should restrict the record and then it should release the restriction. I was able to at least put it on a sales order so I don't know what a restriction is when on the item itself, it didn't block it or anything like that. You can maybe dive into that yourself, I’m not sure if I’ll follow up further on it but it's interesting, I don't know if its a bug or not. But in any case this is the way you can approve items, you can do the same thing for vendors, customers a lot of things and just use the approval templates to set those up.