Consolidated Approvals

Consolidated approvals have been enhanced to handle situations where the same approver is included in multiple dependent steps. The dependencies of the steps are respected, and the approver is assigned approval requests sequentially.

The consolidation feature is available for both approval requests and notifications. This is useful when one user is a part of many requests from a given approval process.

For example, Sam has the following responsibilities:

• Sam is a senior finance manager
• He is part of the Deal Desk queue
• He is part of the Legal Review Team queue
• He plays the role of a senior legal analyst

For a given quote or agreement, Sam must:

• Approve the payment terms.
• Oversee the provided discount as a senior finance manager.
• Approve renewal of a legal contract as a senior legal analyst, being a part of the Legal Review Team queue.

Consolidated Approvals and Notifications is useful when multiple approval requests are assigned to a single user. The approver does not receive multiple emails, but a single email consolidating all approval requests for a particular type. The type can be User, Queue, Role, Related User, Custom User, and more.

For example, when the discount is applied over different line items that require approval, Sam will receive individual emails consolidating the following approval requests:

• Two individual requests related to payment terms and billing frequency
• Two individual notification steps related to payment terms
• Two requests assigned to legal review team
• Two requests assigned to the legal analyst role
• Two notification steps assigned to the legal analyst role

Sam can then go to each request or approve the entire quote or agreement.

Note

• The system does not consolidate approval requests across multiple quotes, agreements or other custom objects.
• The system considers the assignee type (User, Role, Queue, and more) and the request type (Assignment and Notification) when consolidating approval requests.

In the above example, if you do not check Consolidated Approvals, each approval step triggers a separate email notification, and Sam receives ten emails for a given quote or agreement. each corresponding to a different approval step. If Consolidated Approvals is enabled, instead of receiving ten separate email notifications, Sam receives one email notification containing information about all pending approval steps assigned to him. This consolidation streamlines the notification process and reduces email clutter for the approver.

The consolidated notification/email goes to the approver only when all items that require approval are ready and have entered the approval process. Until the last approval request enters the approval process, requests that have already entered the process are kept in On Hold status. 

For scenarios with Consolidated Approvals and Consolidated Notifications checked at the process level,

All approval requests assigned to a user will be in an on-hold status and only the final approval request will be in an assigned status.  An email is sent out to the user with all the available approval requests. Only one request is in the Assigned status while all others are in On-Hold status. The user must approve or reject the approval requests by:

• Approving or rejecting all approval requests at once from email. The decision taken here applies to all the requests: on approval, all the approval requests take the Approved status.
• Approving or rejecting one request in a status assigned from the My Approvals page. 

For information on where Consolidation is used for approvals, see Creating an Approval Process.