Workflows and Approvals in Dynamics NAV

Current activities of the companies most often need some business processes which must allow to the management to be informed or to approve certain transactions, such as payments exceeding a certain amount or granting commercial credit to customers.

For such business requirements in Dynamics NAV there is a functionality  named “workflows” which makes possible:

• Sending approval requests from users to the management in order to record documents (invoices, payments) or to create and modify some elements in Dynamics NAV: customers, vendors, items etc.
• Sending notifications regarding what happened in the system or regarding the tasks to be made.
• Processes automation. For example, if a purchase invoice has been approved, it can be made a setup through which, once the invoice is approved, the invoice is automatically posted and a journal line with payment bank for the vendor is created.

Workflows available in Dynamics NAV

Dynamics NAV (Navision)  has predefined workflows ready to be used without further setup (only activation is needed) and these workflows covers multiple working scenarios, such as:

• Approval for sales and purchases quotes/orders/invoices creation
• Approval for customers and vendors’ creation
• Approval for items’ creation and item price modification
• Approval for changing credit limit for customers
• Approval for payments

For workflows involving amounts an hierarchical level of approval can be setup, according to the document’s amount. Approval can be made either by an user or a group of users. The workflows already available into the system can be found in “Workflow Templates” (see picture).

If none of the predefined workflows does cover the business process requested, you can edit one of the workflow templates or you can create a new workflow starting from scratch.

The principle behind the workflow creation is the following: if a certain event happens, in certain conditions, then a response is generated. Defining an workflow means selecting some events, conditions and responses – what we want to happen as a consequence of those events.

In the picture bellow one can see defined a very simple workflow, which notifies an user if a new customer is created.

If you want to find out more about workflows and approvals, this video could help:

Do you want to explore other functionalities in Dynamics NAV?  Check here: Dynamics NAV (Navision) Resources