How to build workflows in Dynamics 365 Business Central

As you may already know, Dynamics 365 Business Central comes equipped with a whole host of different templates for some of the most common workflows. If you explore this further by going into your Business Central solution and navigating to ‘Workflow Templates’, you will find that there are many options available in terms of pre-defined templates that are likely to cover everything that you need. 

Given our knowledge of Business Central, we find that most clients make use of Purchase Quote Approval Workflow, Purchase Order Approval Workflow, Purchase Invoice Approval Workflow & Journal Entries Workflows. 

If you select the workflow, you will see the workflow steps. From here, you have the ability to either customise or configure the workflows based on requirements. It is important to note that the template itself is unable to be edited, however you are able to start a new one from the template and then tweak it to be able to customise it by heading to ‘Workflows’ followed by ‘New’ then ‘New Workflow from Template’ then select the template you need. 

You will find that the screenshot below shows the Purchase Quote Approval Workflow. By ‘On Condition’ it means that when this step is completed, do this action ‘Then Response’. From this point, you will be able to make changes to the configurations such as defining the approval hierarchy or defining notification emails. 

The most common action that most people do is to change the ‘Add record restriction’. The line ‘create an approval request for the record using approver’ type ‘Approver and approver limit’ then type ‘Approver Chain’, from here you can change it to be either a salesperson/purchaser or approver. If you choose to pick salesperson, it will mean that when you are putting together the quote you will be able to pick who that first person will be by selecting them as the purchaser code. This is handy when you have lots of requesters or you want to send it to various people and not simply the user entering it.  

You will notice that this is a more centralised approach – where an admin builds quotes for different people across different departments. This means they will need to select which department it will be sent to. 

On the other hand, the approver is more of a decentralised approach – it may be the case where there is an admin in each department which means that it is likely to be going to the person’s supervisor. In this case, they won’t need to select a purchase code, they would simply approach whoever the approver is in the setup.