Approval rules
1.Introduction
Prerequisites
In order to understand this document, you must be familiar with our existing Approval flow and how it is working since this is going to be an upgrade/improvement of existing functionality. You can find more about Approval flow and how to manage it on our confluence page.
What will you get with approval rules?
More flexibility
Comparing to what we ha now, approval rules will bring you more flexibility in handling the approval process. You are now able to define multiple rules for each traveler, assign approval managers to each rule, define conditions to control when a particular rule will be applied, and easily prioritize rules.
You can now combine Cost Center and Standard Approval flow
Each rule can have conditions to be applied if a particular Cost Center is selected. As a result, you’re now not obligated to choose between Standard and Cost Center approval flow, they are now one.
Unlimited levels of approval flow
We have removed the limitation on the maximum level of approval flow. You can now have as many levels of approval flow as you want.
2.Setup
2.1 How to enable
To enable Approval rules login as an administrator and navigate to the Website settings, edit Website:
The "Approval Rules Settings" section enable functionality:
Since all of your previously defined approval flows are nothing else than approval rules without conditions for standard approval flow and approval rule with one condition to match cost center for cost center approval flow, you’re given an option to transfer old approvals and create new ones. More words about this will be further in the document.
2.2 Create an approval rule
Make sure that you’re logged in as a travel group administrator and that you are editing your employee profile. Navigate to the Manage Approval tab and you’ll see the “Add rule” button.
When you click on the “Add rule” button a popup form for creating a rule will appear Rule without condition
2.2.1 Rule without condition
Rules can be defined without conditions. If you choose this option that means this rule will always be applicable. This represents the approval process we have had before. We recommend using this as a failover when other defined rules can not be applied.
2.2.1 Conditions
Rules can have one or multiple conditions. There is no limitation on the number of conditions you can select. It’s up to you to define that in a way it will be applicable. There are 3 types of condition you can select and combine:
- Flight type is/is not international
- Price greater than/lower than the specified number
- Cost center is selected cost center
You can choose if the rule is going to be applied if all of the defined conditions are fulfilled (Match ALL) or only one of the defined conditions is fulfilled (Match ANY). You can find an example below.
2.2.2 Approval managers
Approvers are now assigned to the rule, and if the rule is applied you’re going to be able to choose one of the first level approvers on the shopping cart. The selection part is not any different than it was before. You can still define multiple main approvers and one alternative and you can do that on multiple levels. There is no limitation on approval levels you are able to define.
2.2.3 Reorder rules by priority
Our system is going to process rules in a defined order. To change that order and define which rules are going to be considered first you can reorder them any time you want.
Once you have enabled reordering you can simply drag a rule to any position you want
Reordering you have performed will be saved after you save the employee profile you’re editing. After the employee profile is saved following example will look like this:
2.3 Sync Existing Approvals
Since you have seen above how you can define new approval rules and in what way you can combine them, let’s see how the ones that already exist will look after you synchronize them.
2.3.1 Standard Approval flow
An example bellow
After synchronization will look like this
The system will generate a rule without condition with all approval managers you have chosen for standard approval flow
2.3.2 Cost Center Approval flow
An example bellow
After synchronization will look like this
The system will generate a rule with one condition that the cost center will match the one you have defined before, and all approval managers connected to that cost center approval flow will now be assigned to this rule
3 Workflow
3.1 A brief overview
The rule can contain multiple conditions
You can set up that rule will be applied if All conditions are fulfilled or Any of them is fulfilled
Rules are processed in descending order based on the priority you’ve defined
You can define an unlimited number of rules
There is no restriction on the approval level
3.2 Step by step
1. An employee selects a flight (for example) from our search result page
- As soon as the employee clicks on add to cart button, the system will get all approval rules you have defined for this employee.
2. The system will try to find a first applicable rule
- Our system will go through approval rules, will process them one by one in descending order, until it finds the first rule that satisfies the conditions you’ve defined. Based on what you have defined that can be only one condition satisfied (match-any) or all of the conditions satisfied (match-all)
- If the system can not find no rule applicable, we will proceed with the booking requests without approval flow. We suggest you create one rule without conditions that will be applied if no conditions are met for the other defined rules.
3. If an applied rule has a condition with Cost Center
- Our system treats conditions with Cost Center as if they are always fulfilled
- After our system finds this kind of rule as the one that will be applied, the system will continue to process rules in order to find all the rules with Cost Center condition that are applicable and collect them.
- When an employee gets to the shopping cart page he will be able to choose between different Cost Centers and first-level approval managers connected to that approval rule.
System does all of this for the purpose that the process that existed before remains the same.
4. If applied rule does not have condition with Cost Center
- When an employee gets to the shopping cart page he will be able to choose between first level approval managers connected to that approval rule.