Approvals are used to authorize operations, process stages, and validate decisions that require additional control by responsible users (also known as approvers). Approvals are obligatory for normal and emergency changes, absences, vacations, etc. They help to minimize risks, keep high-level service, and conduct secure processes.
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Example The out-of-the-box ITSM application has a predefined approval process for implementing a newrequest template. Before implementation, it must be approved by the service owner. The owner of the service is identified by a reference in the Service Category field. After filling in the fields, an agent switches the state from New to Waiting for Approval. The approval rules are the following:
The service owner decides whether to implement the request template or return it for further improvement.
Conclusion: The approval phase ensures the quality and protects the system from implementation of inappropriate elements. The request template will not be implemented until the service owner or all owners approve it. |
You can implement approvals to any table according to your business processes. Approvals are automatically created according to an approval rule or within a workflow with the User-approval activity.
Approvals associate users or groups with a record to be approved. If users reject an approval, they need to give a reason in the comment.
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When a new approval is assigned to a user, they are notified via email. |
See the My Approvals article to learn how to process approvals via the Self-Service Portal.
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If you create a new custom table and set up approvals for it, you need to define the portal approval card appearance from scratch. As this table is new, the system does not have information about what fields it should display on the portal. See the Customizing portal and agent interfacearticle to learn how to add fields to the portal approval card. |
Approvals
To view the list of created approvals, navigate to Approvals → All Approvals.
On the approval form, the following elements are displayed:
- The summary of the record that needs approving,
- The task info.
- The Comment field.
- The Activity Feed.
Approval states
The approval state flow is as follows:
But the state flow may differ depending on the abortion rules. For example, if the Approval Management abortion rule is One of the tickets rejected, when one of the approvers rejects the ticket, the approval changes to the Canceled state.
Other states may depend on issue types and their state models. For example, approvals for a change request have another state flow defined by its workflow. In the approval phase, the change request is in the Authorization state. If the request is approved, its state changes to the Scheduled state; otherwise, it returns to Registered.
Approval tickets
In SimpleOne, once a record requiring authorization is submitted, the transition stage is initiated. For this, approval tickets are sent to all persons responsible for approval. In tickets, every recipient is proposed to approve or reject the request.
An approval ticket is a record in the Approval (sys_approval) table, which the system sends to every user responsible for approval: one ticket per user, that is, one approval may contain several approval tickets. It is the ticket you see on the My Approvals page. In other words, a user approves or rejects a ticket within one approval.
Approval sets Anchor approval set reject approval set reject
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| approval set reject |
An approval set is a group of Approval (sys_approval) records created by the same approval rule for the same item. That is, these approvals share the same values in the Item field, same approval rules, and are included into one approval set. Approvals created by a workflow are not marked with a set number.
Example:
An approval rule has the following Approval Management abortion rule: one of the approval tickets is rejected. One of three approvers rejected their approval ticket. It is Approval Set 1, and after some required changes, approval was requested once again. This is Approval Set 2, and all three approvers received approval tickets. This process will repeat until the conditions are met (all users approve their tickets).
Create an approval
Approvals cannot be created manually. They are created by the system when conditions defined in an approval rule or a workflow are met. That is, there are two ways to implement approvals into your processes:
- via the approval rules
- via Workflow
Approval rules Anchor approval rule approval rule
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An approval rule is a flexible tool that can trigger on a predefined event. Once triggered, it sends a set of approval tickets and process feedback (approves and rejects). Approval rules can also automatically create a set of approvers.
The following diagram illustrates the process of creating an approval based on an approval rule.
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Role required: admin. |
To create an approval rule, complete the steps below:
- Navigate to Approvals → Approval Rules.
- Click New and fill in the fields.
- Click Save or Save and Exit to apply the changes.
Workflow
You can implement automatic creation of approvals using the User-approval activity in your workflow. Anchor approval via workflow case approval via workflow case
The following example shows a simple process for approving the inclusion of a new partner to a custom table. The flow begins when a new record is inserted into the Partner table. By default, new records are in the Pending state. To activate the partner record, its state must be confirmed by approvers. This is when the user-approval activity is used. Before the record state changes to Relevant (the set values activity), all approvers must confirm that the new partner is relevant and that its record can be transferred to the Relevant state. If one of the approvers rejects the approval, the state of this partner record is Canceled.
See the Workflow articles to learn more.
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When you add an approval via the workflow, there are no related records in the Approval Rule table. Editing the conditions for creating this approval and other attributes is available only through the relevant workflow. |
Track an approval
If an approval is created for a particular record, it is displayed in the Approval related list. Custom tables may not have this tab. You can add it using the related list configuration. After that, all related approval tickets will be displayed.
In the example described above, a new record in the Partner table with the Pending state has the following Approval related list:
See the Related Lists article to learn how to add the Approval tab to the Related Lists area.
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