Conga Approvals enables you to trigger an approval request for any object and send an email notification to the concerned stakeholders. 

Using Approvals, you can set an approval request on an object header, line item, or both. Once an approval request is triggered, an approver can approve or reject a request via email or via Salesforce by logging into their org and viewing all the available requests in the My Approval or Home Page. 

Conga Approvals allows a user to perform the following administrative tasks:

  • Install Conga Approvals
  • Approve, submit a request with or without attachments
  • Reassign an approval request
  • Auto-escalate approval requests
  • Set up an approval process

Key Terminology

It is important to understand how terms are used when working with Conga Approvals.

TermDescription
Approval ProcessThe process definition that describes approval processes within your organizations. You can define approval processes for Opportunity, Agreement or Term Exceptions objects. You have to define entry criteria, initial submission actions, step groups (steps, step filters) and final actions within an approval process.
Approval Rule (Rule)Approval rule uniquely identifies an approver based on combinations of various logical conditions per business process and policies. For example, an agreement needs to be sent for approval to CFO if contract value is above $1M OR (geography is emerging markets AND contract value is above $250K).
Assignee TypeThe system supports the following: Approval Matrix, Auto Approval, Custom Queue, Custom Role, Custom Rule, Related User, Custom User, Queue, Role, User
Assignment Email TemplateEmail template used when an item is reassigned to another user. When an item is assigned to a user for approval, he/she always has an option to reassign the item to another user.
Auto ApprovalThis Assignee Type can be selected for Approval Rule Entry Criteria when you want the item in an approval process to be automatically progressed. For this to work, in an Approval Process step which references that Approval Rule using Auto Approval, the Assigned Approver > Assignee Type must be Subprocess.
Backup ApproversWhen a user is out of office, all approvals can be automatically assigned to backup approvers. The user may choose to reassign in process approval requests to backup approvers as well. 

Consolidated Approvals

If some approval process results in a situation where the same user is required to approve the same object record/line items, these multiple approvals can be consolidated in one approval. In other words, the approver has to approve or reject it only once to approve or reject all of their approval requests for a single approval process.Consider the following approval process with three steps:

Approval StepApprover 1Approver 2Approver 3
Sales Level 1JohnMaryDave
Sales Level 2 (Dependent on 1)JamesJohnSuze
Executive Sign-offArt--


When the object record is submitted for approval and the approvers are selected based on the criteria in the approval process, the approver John is included in two steps, including one dependent step.Once Mary and Dave have approved their requests for the Sales Level 1 step, John's approval request in the Sales Level 2 step will be Assigned to him, while his approval request in Sales Level 1 is on Hold. This enables him to approve both of his approval requests via a single action.

Custom Assignee

Custom assignee option allows you to configure custom code to be called to evaluate an assignee. If none of the other options are meeting the assignment requirements, custom code can be developed to evaluate the approver based on given criteria.
Custom QueueThis assignee type points to a field which contains a queue name in any custom object with a filter to narrow it down to a single row. i.There are two ways to specify a filter: 1. Example 1: Select the row where the ‘Region__c’ field has a value of ‘Asia’. 2. Example 2: Select the row where the ‘Region__c’ field has a value which equals the value of ‘MyRegion__c’ field in the associated business  object
Custom RoleThis points to field which contains a role name in any custom object with filter to narrow down to a single row. For example: Custom_Object__c.Approver_RoleName__c
Custom UserThis points to a user lookup reference field in any custom object with filter to narrow down to a single row.  The custom object may have filter criteria enclosed in parenthesis like the Region filter in this example: Custom_Object__c(Region__c = ‘Asia’).Approver_UserId__c
Entry CriteriaYou can define certain logical conditions as part of entry criteria for an approval process. If these conditions evaluate true, the approval process is evaluated. This criteria allows you to make sure that all agreements (or opportunities) do not process through given approval process.
ReassignWhen an item is assigned to a user for approval, he/she always has an option to reassign the item to another user.
StepA step is a business action of approval which will be performed by a user to approve or reject the record.
Step Assignee TypeThe type of assignee to which the record will be assigned for approval.
UserThis assignee type refers to a named user of the system. Use this assignee type when you want to dynamically assign an approval request to a user.

For more information about terms used with Conga products, see Glossary.