Dynamics 365 Business Central – How to Create a Workflow

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 that happen.

Today we’re going to create a sales order, credit, limit workflow. We’ll cover the setups required in the sales and receivables setup. We’ll review the approval users settings, define a credit limit at the customer card, and then create and enable the workflow itself.

My name is John Hoyt, Solutions Specialist for TMC. Let’s get started. So in this video, we’ll cover the basics in creating a credit limit workflow. There are required setups in BC, in the Sales and Receivable setups window, you have to have the approval user setups completed for the salesperson approver role. You’ll need to define credit limits for your customers and then finally create the sales order credit limit approval workflow itself. Let’s see how this all works, so I’ll start by pulling up my Business Central system and we’re going to start with that sales and receivable setup.

I’ll just search for that. There’s my sales and receivable setup link here what we want to be concerned with are the credit warnings that are going to be displayed to your sales people as they’re entering in sales orders, we can do two different warnings and I currently have my system set for both. You can warn the sales person anytime that the document they’re working on would exceed the available credit limit for that account. You could separately warn them anytime that account has an overdue balance any late payment that needs to be collected. You could choose no warnings at all and ask your sales people to just push every sales order through but in my example, I’m going to give both warnings anytime a credit limit would be violated anytime there’s an overdue balance that needs to be addressed. That’s the sales and receivables setup.

Next in the approval users, setup we need to make sure we have those roles defined properly. So here’s my approval user setup link. Now mine’s real simple I have one employee who can create transactions and the second employee the global admin that does the approval work. The key here is to either define a dollar value at the sales amount, approval limit or with the check box. Give them unlimited sales approval. If you define the dollar value then you can start to create conditions where maybe one person’s initiates the first approval and then there’s a final approval because the dollar threshold had been violated – had been exceeded after the approval user is set up that’s all been completed.

Next we want to take a look at our customer list and there I have displayed in one of my columns the current credit limits, I want to define a credit limit for each one of these customers. Now that I’m going to start to monitor that and ask for approvals and of course I can use my page function here and I can go edit this customer list out in excel and that will give me all the updated credit limits that I’m going to need after the customers have had their credit limits defined we’re ready to actually start the workflow approval setup process itself and again I’ll use the search function we’ll look for the workflows. This takes me to the list of the workflows that have already been created and a couple have been enabled within my system.

For our purposes, I’m simply going to create a new workflow. I want to do this based upon one of the existing out of the box templates. In this case, the limit that I want to work with is down here in my sales documents sections. We’re going to work with the sales order credit limit approval workflow like all the rest of the templates. This is a predefined or pre configured workflow that really we only need to do those kind of basic setups that you’ve seen already. Make sure we have the approval users set up with the limits we’re going to credit, limit the customers, provide the warnings – things like that.

Now we’re going to go and actually work in the approval itself and I really think of these as kind of a “if…then” engine I have a when event something is going to occur some event inside the system, then there will be conditions associated with that event and based upon the results of that condition we’re going to generate one or more of the appropriate responses and all of these steps have been predefined we just may need to go through and make a couple of small tweaks or changes or something of that nature so it’s really kind of customized to what you’re looking to accomplish in this case sales order credit limit so the approval of the sales document has been requested. My sales order type is order my status is set to open response the system is going to go check have we exceeded the credit limit for that customer. If it’s been exceeded, then we’re going to go through and we’re going to take some additional steps. We’re going to add a record restriction, we’re going to set the document status to the pending approval status, we’re going to create an approval request for this record using the approver type salesperson, purchaser, and the approver limit type, approver chain and then down the bottom I’ve got some additional options that we can set up who’s my approver type, what’s the limit.

I can choose to delegate the responsibility either never it’s always going to be the approver’s responsibility or maybe I want to say after two days or something. We’ll go through and move that on and we’ll send out a outbound request. We can include attachments or links coming back to the document this is the notification step and then the other conditions follow or the when events follow it’s been approved it’s been rejected etc.

What are we going to do in those cases remove the record restriction, so we can change its status we can allow it to be approved etc. Then once it’s been approved we can pick back ship, transfer to invoice, walk through the rest of the pieces. That’s really how quick and simple it can be. I only have a couple of pieces of information that I need to verify. I can use that as is when I’m done. I can simply click enabled and that workflow will now be set up inside this company.

So to review we covered the basics in creating a credit limit workflow here. We looked at the required setups in the sales and receivables module. We talked about the approval user setup and making sure that sales person approver role has been defined, establish credit limits for our customers and again that’s as easy as just export the customer list out to excel, update the crest, the credit limit value and publish that back into Business Central and then using one of the predefined templates. We went through and created the workflow and then enabled it.

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 add a comment down below. I’ll do my best to answer your comments and if you need any immediate technical support I invite you to visit our website about www.abouttmc.com . Also don’t forget to like this video and please subscribe to our channel!