Approveit Guide: How to Create an Approval Workflow

We’ve issued a big update, and the interface of the workflow builder has changed. In this guide, we will walk you through the new workflow building process.

PLEASE NOTE, that none of your existing workflows will break, everything will work just as it used to.

So, let’s get started!

1. To create your approval workflow, you need to go to the “Workflow” tab in the left-side menu and click the “Create new workflow” button that appears on your screen.

2. Next, you’ll be asked to choose the approval form template that suits your use case. In case you don’t see the appropriate template, just choose the Empty template and later you’ll be able to configure it from scratch.

3. You’re now in the workflow builder. All the configuration of your process will be happening here.

In the right-side menu, you’ll see the workflow details where you can rename your workflow, assign categories to it, and change privacy settings.

There’s also a toggle “Ask requestors to select watchers for their requests”. By activating this, you’ll add a dropdown field to all approval forms with all your team members and the label “Choose watchers”

To configure your approval form, click the “Configure form fields” button

It will lead you to the approval form builder. You can add the fields to your form from the right-side menu, label fields for your requestors, and mark them as required if necessary.

Please, note – whenever you add the field to your form, you need to enter the LABEL of that field and NOT the actual data you’d want approved.

If you’d like to create a vendor approval form, or sync data from your approval requests with accounting software, you’d need the “Change form type” button.

Click it, and it will take you to the screen where you can select a vendor approval form or an accounting software intake form.

4. Once your approval form is configured, you can hit “Save” and proceed to the configuration of your approval flow by hitting the “Configure approvers” button.

Here you create your approval flow, set up additional notifications and, of course, assign approvers.

This is where you also configure conditions for your approval steps.

You can base conditions on 5 types of fields:

• Amount
• Single select (dropdown)
• Line item with a “Total” sum
• Department
• Location

You can add conditions based on two fields simultaneously.

Note: When setting up conditions, you need to create one “Default” step – the step that gets triggered if no conditions from previous steps were met.

5. Once you’ve completed configuring both the approval form and approvers, we can turn to the Stage Settings

Here you can rename your stage, change the channel where approvers receive notifications of this stage, make this stage’s form public, and set up outbound integrations (which means that data from this stage goes to a third-party app upon approval).

6. You can create multiple stages within one workflow. To add a new stage, hit the “+” icon under your existing stage.

Stage types:

• intake form (when, for example, upon approval of the request for the budget of the new project, the next person can now request payments of the bills for this project)
• task (for example, after you approve the bill, your teammate gets a task to pay it)
• outbound integration (once your request was approved, now you need to transfer certain data to a third-party app. This works only with SoftLedger at the moment, but will be expanded to other partners in future)

To configure your task, just hit the button “Configure task”, or a pencil icon to the right of the task name

You can add a task name, task description and choose task assignee from the menu that opens

Once you’ve created all your workflow stages and chosen assignees and notification settings, you can save your workflow!