How to Set Up Sales Approvals in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016                 

In our coffee mug business we are ever expanding and ever requiring new things to do with our NAV system. Fortunately NAV is extremely flexible and has a lot of features and one of them we need today.

This one is called Approvals. It’s very common for a lot of businesses to have an approval process in place, especially on the sales orders and so in this case we are actually going to show you how a sales order approval would function.

What I’m going to do first is show you the process from a user perspective once it has been set up and then I will highlight the set ups that need to be done – not going in detail in those because there are a lot of options but it’s fairly easy to set up many standard ones out of the box.

Quick Set Up
Ok so first of all just a little bit on the set up first.

If I go into the Approval – Approval User Setup right here.

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Here this table will actually set up the users that are involved in the approval process and what I have now done as I stated before is we have these 2 users Demo and Demo 2. I don’t get to use my own name here, I have to be called Demo – that’s fine.

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And so basically Demo 1 or Demo without anything has unlimited sales approval. Right here just open that up and Demo 2 has Demo as the approver and we have given Demo 2 $5000 approval limit so Demo 2 can approve up to $5000.

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But after that the system will look for an approver (which is Demo) and send an approval to Demo. And that should come to this email address over here.

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Testing Approval
Ok so let’s test this out. I actually need to log in as Demo 2 in order to demonstrate this. So I’m going to close out.

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Close this out too, this all of my NAV instances.

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I go into my menu here and I might have used this before but I can right click and say Run As A Different User.

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Log-in as Approver
And I want to be 'Demo 2' and let’s see if I can get in.

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Yes ok. So I’m in here as 'Demo 2'.

Create a New Sales Order
Now I want to go to my Sales Orders.

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And create a new Sales Order.

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And again we are going to sell The Cannon Group.

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They are a really big client and have not paid their bills for a long time.

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So also the standard coffee mug is going out to them.

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And we’re selling 1000, yes we don’t have it but that’s ok, for $10 each.

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So right now we have $10,000 order going out and what I want to do is actually, let me see, is open this up and hit Send Approval Request.

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So an approval request has been sent and now it goes Pending Approval. Ok. Good enough.

Now I’m just going to wait for ‘Demo’ to approve this order so I can continue with posting it and shipping it.

So if I close this out all the way.

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Check Email for Approval
I can actually go into the email and this is the email for Demo and we should be getting an email soon.

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Yep there it is.

So there’s a notification that comes over, telling me that sales order number 1022 needs to be approved for The Cannon Group for $10,000.

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So this comes into the email box for Demo. I can click here to actually open up NAV to view this order as Demo this case.

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View the Order
It opens up and we go straight into this.

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Now I can go ahead and say ok ‘Demo 2’ is sending this to me I can open the record.

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And take a look at the order, ok it looks fine.

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We know they are going to pay and everything is good with the product.

Add a Comment to the Approval
So I can go ahead and actually put a comment onto this.

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And say ‘Just make sure they pay the agreed amount’ and just hit Ok.

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Approve
And then I can go ahead and hit Approve. And now this has been approved.

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So I’m closing out again, wearing a lot of hats today.

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View Approval as Requester
Now I go in as 'Demo 2'. 

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Log-in.

 

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I can just go in to the last Sales Order and just go here.

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Actually this one would be released so let’s go into Approved. 

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And there it is : Approved. So this one is then ready to ship out.

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Workflow
So there are a few things that went into setting this up and I’m quickly going to go over that without dragging this out too long, trying to keep the videos short.

So one thing is the workflows.

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So this contains a workflow and NAV ships with a lot of different workflows.

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What I have enabled is just one workflow for sales documents: the sales order approval workflow.

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I’ve enabled this particular one. This comes with NAV already set up. You can configure it to do different things.

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One idea would be sending an email to the recipient when it’s approved etc. So you can add that to this fairly easily and this is so user configurable.

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Set up Notifications
Also you need to set up notifications. Notification set up is here.

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Basically you set up a template, a notification template and you tell the system when to run it. In this case I have it set to run instantly.

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Meaning that it doesn’t bunch things up and send them overnight. Right away when you send for approval, the approval email goes out.

SMTP Email Set up
And finally what’s important in this is the SMTP set up.

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Now SMTP for those that don’t know what that is, it’s a send mail set up so there is a send mail protocol that needs to be set up or send mail service.

So we need to point to the Send Mail Server. In this case we use Office 365.

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And you can actually apply the Office 365 Server settings here so you don’t really have to figure out the port etc.

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All you need to do is have a log in for a user that is delegated and make sure that it is a secure connection and then the system should be ready to go.

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And then your approvals should work just like I demonstrated. And that was it.