Term exception approvals are unique to term exceptions and cannot be used with other objects, unlike a standard approval process that can be used with such objects as agreements, opportunities, or quote/proposals.

An approval with a term exception is useful when your customer requests a change to an existing clause that requires approval from your company's CFO, and this clause is specific to that customer. If, in this example, you renew an agreement for a specific customer who wants to enter a new clause, you might want your legal team to approve the new clause before adding it to the renewed agreement. You add the new clause, associate it with a term exception, and define a term exception approval for it.

A term exception can have multiple clauses and correspondingly multiple approval requests associated with it. These approval requests are configured using the term exception approval records and are triggered when the user clicks Submit or Preview on the agreement term exception record under an agreement.

The normal flow to trigger an approval request for an agreement term exception is:

  1. Create an approval process on the agreement term exception object. For more information, see Creating an Approval Process.
  2. Create a term exception approval record and specify term exception approval conditions (optional).
  3. For your agreement record, create agreement term exception records for the term exception used in Step 2.
  4. Submit or preview the agreement term exception record for approval.

Term exception approvals are made up of a main approval object, which can contain multiple approval conditions. The table below provides the agreement and the corresponding term status for term exceptions approval requests.

AgreementTerm status
ApprovedAll terms are approved.
Rejected

One term is rejected.

If a user clicks Submit for Approval after a term is rejected, the rejected term and new additions to terms are routed for an approval and the status changes to Pending Approval.

Not Submitted

All terms are not submitted.

If a Valid To date changes, or a new term is added to a request in progress, the agreement status becomes Not Submitted. Only new terms should be routed for approval. To re-submit all terms, the user must cancel and click Submit for Approval again.

Cancelled

All terms are canceled.

If a user clicks Cancel, the status of all terms changes to Cancelled. If the user then clicks Submit for Approval, all terms move to Pending Approval.

Pending ApprovalOne or more terms has a Pending Approval status (none are rejected).
ClosedOrder operations move the agreement status to Closed once orders are being booked. Adding or changing terms is no longer possible.
ExpiredAn automated agent changes the agreement status to Expired when a Valid To date is passed. If there are changes to the Valid To date, the agreement status changes to Not Submitted.  If the user then clicks Submit for Approval, the agreement status and status of all terms is Pending Approval.

To create a term exception approval

There must be an existing term exception to associate the approval with. For details on how to create term exception records, see CLM for Administrators.

  1. Select the Term Exception Approvals tab or click All Tabs and select Term Exception Approvals.
  2. Click New to display the Edit Term Exception Approval page.
  3. Use the lookup to select the term exception and any dependencies.
  4. Select the process approvers by selecting from Assigned Approver > Assignee Type.

    If you select Rule as an assignee type, the approval request is sent only to the first user that satisfies the filter criteria in the approval rule. If you have multiple approvers in a sequence, only the first approver is selected and assigned.

  5. Select Send Email to notify the assignee by email that they must approve or reject the object record and select Notify Only to only inform the assignee by email that the approval process has reached this step, without any actions to take.
  6. Select Active to enable the approval to be used with the Term Exception
  7. Click Save.

An approval process is now in place for the term exception. You may create Term Exception Approval Conditions, but they are not required for a term exception approval. You must create an agreement term exception record under your agreement, choose the specific term exception for which you configured the term exception approval, and click Submit to begin approval process.

To create a term exception approval condition

  1. Select a term exception approval and click New Term Exception Approval Condition. 
    By default, the condition is active and already has the Term Exception Approval field populated.
  2. Enter values for the following:

    OptionDescription
    NumberThis is the sequence number. Conditions are evaluated in the order specified by this field. When a condition evaluates to False, remaining conditions are ignored.
    Object QualifierThis is required to qualify the object and associate it with the condition.
    ObjectThis is the object the condition applies to. The API name of the field should be used.
    FieldThis is the field associated with the object, that is used to evaluate whether the condition is true or false. The API name of the field should be used.
    OperatorThis is used to compare Field and Value.
    ValueThese values are compared with Field. Multiple values can be included by separating them with a comma, such asvalue1, value2, value3. This creates an OR relationship between the values.
  3. Set the Join field to AND or OR to establish its relationship with subsequent conditions.
  4. Enter a description and click Save.