Approval Templates Table
The Approval Templates table holds a record for each approval to be created as part of a standard Approval Workflow. It predefines the approval team or person and also controls whether the approval is conditional on some meta data criteria being met or is always generated. Each approval template can only be used by a single approval workflow, i.e., there is a one-to-many relationship between approval workflows and approval templates.
Use Case
Approval Templates can be created by users in the Admin, Contract Manager, Change Manager, and Service Manager groups. New approval template records are normally added from within an approval workflow record. Creating an approval template from the Approval Workflow table populates the link to the workflow. If an approval template is created directly from the Approval Template table, a linked Workflow Title should be manually selected.
Each template contains information about which Workflow uses the approval template, whether the approval is Required or Conditional, and how the approval is assigned. The required fields are Approval Title, Assign Approval Based On, and Step Number.
The Related Records tab displays all other approval templates used in the same workflow.
The Step Number and title for the approval are used when converting the template to an Approval record.
Required vs. Conditional Approvals
In the Approval Usage field, the user sets whether the approval is Required or Conditional. Both required and conditional approvals are automatically generated when the Create Approvals button is clicked in the contract record or the Generate Approvals from Workflow button is clicked in the change request record.
When Conditional is selected, the Condition field will appear. The user can then input a formula that is evaluated when approvals are generated. This formula can contain any number of conditions that can be linked together by operators such as "or", "and", "contains", etc. Conditional approvals are only generated if the condition is met (typically the Condition is a search criterion based on some field value(s) in the Contract).
Assigning Approvals
Approvals can be assigned to teams or users based on fields in the Approval Template or other variable fields from the parent record such as Contract Owner, Requester Manager, Contract Department Head, or Change Manager, Change Requester, etc.
If "Fields in Approval Template" is selected in the Assign Approval Based On field, the Approval Team and Approver fields are visible. The Approver field is filtered to members of the selected Approval Team.
If, for an approval template for contracts, "Person from Contract" is selected, the Assign To field appears. The drop-down selection in this field shows a list of user fields from the Contract record, such as Contract Owner, Contract Requester, and Requester Manager.
Admin Note: The selections in the Assign To field are linked from the Replacement Variables table. Refer to the Replacement Variables Table section for more information.
Similarly, when "Team from Contract" is selected, a team can be chosen from the Assign To dropdown. For approval templates related to change requests, the options for Assign Approval Based On are "Person from Change Request" and "Team from Change Request."
Sequence of Approvals
The sequence of approvals depends on the Step Numbers. Approvals are generated and ordered based on the Step Number order, and are triggered to Pending Approval from the lowest to the highest Step Number. To set up parallel Approvals, give the same Step Number to each Approval Template in a parallel step. All concurrent Approvals (that is, Approvals with the same step number) must be approved in order to trigger the next step.
The automation that controls the triggering and ordering of approvals is managed from the Approval record, not the Approval Template. Fields in the approval record are used to determine if there are concurrent approvals and to define the Lowest Step Number (which may not be 1, if the first step is a conditional approval marked Not Needed).
Automatic Approvals
You can use an approval template simply as a notification rather than an approval. This is done by setting the Auto Approve? field to Yes. When the template is converted into an Approval record, a rule running on the Approval table automatically sets the approval's Status to Approved. If Notify for Auto-Approval is set to Yes, this rule also sends a custom notification message in place of the assignment notification.