Dynamics 365 Business Central – Basic Workflows Part 1

Hello and welcome to TMC’s “How-To” demo series for Dynamics 365 Business Central, where we explore the features of Business Central for basic tasks within your organization. If you can’t find a demo you’re looking for let us know in the comments below and we’ll try to make it happen today.

We’re going to begin with Basic Workflows in Dynamics 365 BC. In part one of this workflow video will cover the basic components of the setups. In part two, we’ll walk through an example. My name is John Hoyt, Solution Specialist for TMC, let’s get started.

In this video we’ll begin with:

The basics in the workflow module
The workflow templates
The workflow setups conditions and responses
The approval user setup

Let’s see how this works. I’ll start by bringing up my BC system and we’ll use the search function and first we’re going to look for the workflow templates out of the box. BC ships with all the different workflow templates that you see here organized into the different sections. They’re pre-configured for the most part. There’s still going to be a little bit of configuration you’ll need to do on your end but a lot of that is simply determining the conditions and the participants that you’re going to need to work with.

In today’s example we’re going to be talking about the purchase order invoice approval and once we get that drawn up in part two of the video we’ll go through and see how it actually functions. To create a new workflow you can just click on the new button here. Say I want to create a new workflow from a template, select the template you want to use that’s the starting point.

Let’s turn our attention now. We’ll take a look at one of the existing workflows in my system and we’ll see the details that go into that. So in my demo company I’ve got five workflows set up or created but only have one currently enabled one that’s currently

in use and that’s the purchase invoice approval workflow. I’ve got a couple others I could use if i needed on the customer side item side things like that. In this case let’s drill down into the details of that enabled workflow purchases invoice approval. The code name simply got created based upon the template when I built this. There’s no reason to change that you can leave that the way it is. Description just so we can find it in the list. the categories these will correspond to those same groupings that we saw in the workflow templates – where do you want to put this? So just from management perspective so they’re organized properly. The enabled – yes or no, and you have to have them unenabled or disabled in order to make edits or changes but they won’t function until they’ve actually been enabled and then down below you can see the different steps or the different when events. That first column is basically telling the workflow if something is found. A when event – so it’s been delegated it’s been rejected it’s been approved etc.

Next column the second column are where I specify the conditions under which I want that when event to trigger a workflow approval. In some cases you may want to do it consistently under all circumstances, every time someone wants to create a new vendor I want that approval process to take place. In other cases you may create some specific conditions under which you want in other conditions if they don’t reach your threshold you can let them go forward. Then a response if that condition has been detected. What do we want to have happen next? And I’ll give you an example of a couple of those.

The very first one here- the condition a purchase approval is requested well under what circumstances under what conditions I can select document types one or more document types could trigger this off particular status that I have enabled somewhere in the system.

I can also do some restrictions a specific vendor specific payment term, specific currency code, maybe I want all my foreign exchange transactions to go through a workflow approval process etc. Once I’ve defined the conditions then I want to specify okay then what happens next? And in this case with the creation of a new approval workflow, I have four responses the first one simply adds in a record restriction that’s predefined out of the template, putting the document on hold, pending approval– don’t do anything else.

Second step is that step to set the status of the document now to pending approval. Third step we’re going to create a request and deliver that request out to the appropriate people based on these options. Do we want a confirmation message to go out to the user to let them know that the approval request has been created? When is that request need to be completed? What’s the due date formula? When to delegate the approver type that could be a specific named approver it could be a relationship it could be a defined role in the organization chart.

These conditions on the response then determine who’s going to be notified what they’re going to see what they can see when they do something. And then finally as the third part of our workflow approval video here in part one you’re going to need to define who in your organization is going to be participating in these workflows and we do this with the approval user setup. I’ve gone through here and I’ve created a couple of basic relationships my BC demo user is the user that I want, need to create and request an approval that BC demo is then approved by my global admin user. That global admin user has the abilities to approve unlimited amounts. I’ve included the email addresses to communicate with these people so that the notifications will get delivered to the appropriate inboxes etc. This is a very basic setup in the approval users most real world

situations will involve more people with more activities etc. We do include the ability to then test the users as you’re setting them up to make sure they’ve been configured

properly you also have options to go through and do the notification setups under what circumstances how frequently just one recipient all the recipients etc. All that will go through as part of the approval user setups and with that let me back out of Business Central again.

So in this video we looked through:

The basic components of the workflow module
The templates
The setups
The approval users

In part two of this video we’ll walk through the steps in completing a workflow approval.

That wraps up this video if you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion on what we should cover in the next video please comment down below. I’ll do my best to answer your comments and if you need immediate technical support, I invite you to visit our website www.abouttmc.com also don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel.