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Expense Reports Classic Approval Process Example
If your company requires that employees file expense reports for managers to approve, you can automate this process in Salesforce.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
Important Try Flow Approval Processes, a modern alternative to Classic Approval Processes. This
new feature provides a more flexible, user-friendly flow-based interface, and it can trigger
on record changes, supporting Apex extensibility and detailed logging for compliance and
audit trails. It supports dynamic routing based on data and business rules, unlike Classic
Approval Processes, which are tied to specific objects and offer limited support for
processes by using conditions. With Flow Approval Processes, you can monitor submitted
records and quickly identify bottlenecks, giving you unprecedented visibility into approval
workflows. And, like Classic Approval Processes, Flow Approval Processes don’t consume
automation credits or orchestration runs.
Use this example to create a two-step expense report classic approval process for all employees in your headquarters office. It specifies that expenses less than $50 are automatically approved, expenses $50 and over require manager approval, and expenses over $5,000 require additional approval from two VPs. This example highlights a parallel classic approval process and the “else” option.
Prep Your Organization:
Before creating the classic approval process:
- If you don’t yet have a custom object to track your expenses, create a custom object and tab called Expense Reports. Add the appropriate fields such as Amount, Description, Status, Start Date, and End Date.
- Create a custom field on the user object Office Location. Assign the “HQ” value to users in the headquarters office location.
Create the Classic Approval Process:
Create a classic approval process using the Expense Report custom object and specify the following:
- The filter criteria for this classic approval process is Current User: Office Location equals HQ. Records must meet this criteria before they can be submitted to this classic approval process.
- Choose the Manager field as the next automated approver.
- To notify approvers that their approval is requested, create an email template. To direct users to the approval page in Salesforce, include approval process merge fields.
- Choose the record owner or any other user who you want to be able to submit expense reports.
- Create these approval steps.
- Create a step named Step 1: Manager Approval with these specifications:
- Name this step Step 1: Manager Approval.
- Select Enter this step if the following and choose criteria are met. Also, choose approve record for the else option.
- Set the filter criteria to: Expense: Amount greater or equal 50.
- In the Automatically assign to approver(s) option, select the manager of the user submitting the request.
- If appropriate, choose The approver's delegate may also approve this request if you want to allow the user in the Delegated Approver field to approve requests.
- Create an approval step named Step 2: Multiple VP Approval
and specify these attributes.
- Use the filter criteria Expense Amount greater or equal 5000.
- Choose Automatically assign to approver(s) and select two users with a VP role.
- Select the Require UNANIMOUS approval from all selected approvers option. The request isn’t approved unless both designated users approve.
- If appropriate, choose The approver's delegate may also approve this request if you want to allow the user in the Delegated Approver field to approve requests.
- Choose Perform ONLY the rejection actions for this step... so that the request returns to the manager for changes if one of the VPs rejects the request.
- Create a step named Step 1: Manager Approval with these specifications:
Tip Consider creating these final approval actions:
- Define a field update to automatically change the Status field to “Approved.”
- Send an approval notification to the user who submitted the expense report.
- To print a reimbursement check, send an outbound message to your back-office financial system.
Wrap Things Up:
- After you created the classic approval process, add the Approval History related list to the Expense Report object page layout.
- Consider adding the Items To Approved related list to your custom home page layouts. The related list shows users all approval requests that are waiting for their response.
- If you have a sandbox, test the classic approval process, then activate it.
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