An approval process can be created on a project, task, or issue. These should not be confused with document approvals or proof approvals, which are specific approval requests for a particular document or proof. There are two types of approval processes. A global approval process, also known as an existing approval process, and a single-use approval process. These are similar in many ways and different in a few ways. You’ll see the similarities and differences as we go along. First, the global approval process. These are often created by the system administrator or a group administrator, but the ability to create them can be delegated to anyone with a plan or standard license by checking the Allow Administrative Access for approval processes box in the Access level. To create a global approval process, go to Setup, Processes, Approvals. Approval processes for projects, tasks, and issues are all created in the same way, but they can only be used in the object they’re created for. So project approval processes can only be used in projects. Task approval processes can only be used for tasks, and issue approvals can only be used in issues. We’ll create a task approval process for tasks that require the approval of a copywriter before the task can be marked as complete. We’ll click on New Approval Process, and we’re brought to this page. We’ll name the approval process Copywriter Approval. You can decide here if you want to make this available for all groups or only a certain group. Next, there’s the path. This is triggered when the task is set to the status you select here. If you want to have different approval paths for different statuses, you can create additional paths here. In this case, we want to trigger this approval process when the status is set to Complete. So when the task is marked as complete, the task status will change to Complete Pending Approval and will not really be complete until it is approved. Whoever we designate in the Approvers area will be notified and, after they give their approval, the task status will be changed to Complete. If the approval is rejected, the task will be changed to another status. The status it will be changed to is designated here. The default is to change it back to the status it was before being marked complete, but you can choose a particular status if you want. Then, of course, we need to designate who will approve the task. If we select a person, they will get a notification when the task needs to be approved. If we select a job role, like Copywriter, everyone on the project team who has that job role will be notified, and when the first of those notified approves the task, it will be approved, and the approval notification will be withdrawn from the others. If you want to have more than one person, job role, or team approve the task, you can put multiple names here. Then this checkbox comes up so you can choose whether only one decision is required or if you want everyone to approve. By unchecking this, it would mean we want one person on the project team with the Copywriter role, one member of the creative team, and Duck Phillips to approve this task. Everyone will get notified at the same time, and they can do their approvals in any order. Another way to approach a situation where you need multiple approvers would be to break this into stages. Take off all but the Copywriter for stage one. Then we’ll add a stage. Stage two, we’ll do the creative team. Add another stage. Stage three, it’ll be our friend Duck. Now stage one will be the first approval required, then if one of the Copywriters approves it, the creative team would be notified that it’s their turn to approve it. If anyone from the creative team approves it, Duck Phillips will then be notified to approve it. If a Copywriter rejects it, the status will change to the previous status and the person assigned to the task will need to do some rework before changing the status back to complete and starting the approval process again. The advantage with this approach is that Duck Phillips will not be notified to approve the task until the approvers from all the previous stages have already approved it. We’ll remove the extra stages and click Save to save this approval process. So now it’s just a Copywriter approval process looking for a Copywriter to approve it. That shows up on our list here. But it also shows up when we select a task, go to the Approvals tab and click on the Use Existing list. So we have Copywriter approval here. Now to create a single-use approval process, just click on Create Single-Use. Single-use means you can create an approval process in the same way as we just created a global approval process, only it will be saved with this task only. It cannot be shared like a global approval process can. There is a third option as well. You can choose a global approval process like Copywriter approval, save it. Then once you’ve saved it, this little Edit option appears and we can edit this approval process. Say we just want to have a particular person, Ann Owen, to be the approver. Let me get rid of Copywriter and now we save it. When we save it, we get this Convert Approval Process message. It says, Changes you make to the approval process attached from setup will be available only on this object. That’s what we want, so we’ll save it. Even though this is a single-use approval process, you can copy the task and keep the approval process with it. We can copy this, put it in another project, and notice the Approval Process option down here that it can carry over to it. Now we’re in this Easter sale mailer and we have this single-use approval process with it. You can also create project templates with single-use approval processes in them.
