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 Approval Requests and Notifications both. This is useful when a single user is a part of multiple approval requests from a given approval process.

For example, Sam has the following responsibilities:

• Sam is a Senior Finance Manager
• He is a part of Deal Desk queue
• He is a part of Legal Review Team queue
• He plays a role of Senior Legal Analyst

For a given Quote/Agreement, Sam has to perform the following:

• Approve the payment terms.
• As a Senior Finance Manager, oversee the discount provided.
• As a Senior Legal Analyst, approve renewal of a legal contract, being a part of the Legal queue.

In such cases, when there are multiple approval requests being assigned to a single user, Consolidated Approvals and Notifications is useful. When implemented, the approver does not receive multiple emails, but a single email consolidating all the 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 which require approval, Sam will receive individual emails consolidating the following approval requests:

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

Sam can then go to each request or approve the entire Quote/Agreement.

Note:

1. System does not consolidate approval requests across multiple quotes, agreements or other custom objects.
2. System considers the Assignee Type (User, Role, Queue, and more) and the Request Type (Assignment and Notification) while consolidating the approval requests.

In the above example, in case if you do not check Consolidated Approvals, Sam will receive 10 emails for a given Quote/Agreement.

When Consolidated Approvals is checked, separate emails will be sent for each of the responsibility of Sam, because there are different approval steps configured for each such responsibility.

In total, Sam will receive 5 email notifications, one for each of his responsibility.

• 1 email, consolidating 2 User notification requests assigned to Sam, which are related to payment terms and billing frequency.
• 1 email, consolidating 2 Requests, which are assigned to Legal review Team Queue.
• 1 email, consolidating 2 Requests, which are assigned to the Role: Senior Legal Analyst.
• 1 email, consolidating 2 notifications steps, which are assigned to the Role: Senior Legal Analyst.
• 1 email, consolidating 2 requests assigned to the Deal Desk Queue.

The consolidated notification/email goes to the approver only when all the items, which require approval are ready for approval and have entered the approval process. Till the time the last approval request enters the approval process, the requests which have already entered the process are kept in the 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 will be in the Assigned status while all other will be in an On-Hold status. It depends on the user to approve/reject the approval requests by one of the following options:

• Approve/reject all the approval requests at one go from the email. The decision taken here is applied to all the requests, which means, when approved, all the approval requests will have the Approved status.
• Approve/reject one request which is in assigned status from MyApprovals page. The decision taken here is applied to all the requests, which means, when approved, all the approval requests will have the Approved status.

For information on where Consolidation is used for Approvals, refer Creating an Approval Process under an Approval Process.