Approvals on Wingate365

Notifications for Approvals Made Easy

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 15:56:00 +0000

Here is a video to show the step-by-step process to check and modify the notifications that are sent at different stages of an native BC approval workflow. Inspired by listening to Steve Endowâ€™s latest podcast, his team are trying out both Power Automate Approvals and Native Approvals to meet various client requirements.

Step-by-Step: Setting Up General Journal Batch Approval in Business Central

Approvals are a critical part of any financial process, and Business Central provides a robust General Journal Batch Approval workflow right out of the box. However, a common request from users is to notify the requestor once their batch has been approvedâ€”so Iâ€™ve added that as well!

Give me Dynamics 365 BC approvals with auto-delegation driven by Outlook Out-of-Office

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 16:48:00 +0000

This is something I'm asked on most projects when we get to the topic of approvals.

Client: "WOW these BC approval workflows look good, and I expect the approval will be automatically delegated if the user has their outlook out-of-office on, right?"
Me: "About that..."

Contina does a good effort on managing out-of-office Setting up Approval Sharing, but it's a config that's inside BC, and it doesn't cover all document types.

Most users simply expect out-of-office to be something you setup once in outlook and it's shared to all the other MS apps.

I've confessed in the past that I rather use BC approvals over Power Automate approvals. Possibly that's driven by me simply being able to setup and test anything from simple to big hairy approvals in BC a lot faster than in PA.

Yes, there is an automatic delegation in BC workflows. It works on a count down, it will auto delegate after x many days. But it is very rarely used, if ever. Why? Consider the real word situation. Someone asked you to approve something, but you can't right away. Could be a number of reasons why; you need to look something up, check with someone who is away etc etc. Maybe you just need to sit on it for a bit. The last thing you want is the approval going to someone else in these situations!

To solve the problem above I wanted to take a blended approach; use BC for the approvals and PA for its low-code access to Exchange Online / Outlook for the out of office status of a user.

Solution

Create Approval workflow of any kind in BC [Config]

Set up approval workflows - Business Central | Microsoft Learn

Create API query for approval entries & users emails [AL code]

Dynamics 365 Business Central: API query type (Develop a custom API using Query) | Dynamics 365 Lab

Create API page for the 'delegate' action as an OData bound action [AL code]

Dynamics 365 Business Central: How to use Standard/Custom API Bound Actions | Dynamics 365 Lab

Create a PA flow that checks the Outlook Out-of-Office status of the approver of open approval entries and delegates these [Low-code]

tldr-dynamics | Check user's out of office status using Power Automate
And this thank you FlowJoe! Easily Avoid Apply to Each Loops | Power Automate

The key part here was to have PA fetch only the open approval entries and then loop though and only delegate those where the approval user was sending automatic replies / had set out-of-office.

This solution was put together with help from my good buddy Lee Noble who sorted the code for the OData bound action. Thank you Lee!

BC Approval

I've kept it simple in this example, but because the delegation simply works based on approval entries created it should work for any kind of approval you (or you customers) dream up!

I've used the standard template for Purchase Order approval (because it takes only a few clicks to active)!

Vanilla PO Approval from the standard template

Bare bones approval user setup - just to highlight a few important points. As you may know only the Approval Admin can delegate 'anything' so be sure to create the PA flow that's going to be doing delegating in the name of that account.

It's possible that the OData bound / API calling of 'delegate' wont have the same restriction, but I've yet to test that.

Mastering D365BC approval workflows, part 2

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 12:26:00 +0000

Last week I posted about multi-approvals (i.e. how to send different types of approval from within one workflow entry Multi-Approvals inside 1 Workflow).

This post is looking at some other tips for workflows based on this recent requirement I dealt with.

The history on this approval was a lesson in capturing the requirements. The team had spend a fair bit of time setting this up as a large Power Automate approval flow. But testing and debugging was a challenge. In the end we moved back to BC Approvals and the whole job was a lot easier and the system more stable.

Multi-Approvals inside 1 Workflow - How to master Dynamics 365 Business Central Workflows

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 14:43:00 +0000

Approvals are a vital business control process, the most common area being around the approval for purchases and expenditure.

Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365BC) has a built-in approval workflow engine and can also tap into Power Automate Approvals.

Approvals via Power Automate have a few really great positives, but this post is not about those. Here I'd like share some tips on using BC's built-in approval engine for some complex scenarios.

Show Me the Money! or Check Who Approved the Document You Are About to Pay in Dynamics 365 Business Central

Sat, 06 May 2023 13:48:00 +0000

Power BI and Dynamics 365 Business Central work great together. In a previous blog post, we looked at publishing a custom dataset from the wizard in BC. In this blog post, we will take things a step further by creating a custom query and publishing that for use in Power BI.

The requirement here is simple enough. Running the suggest vendor payment function can create a payment batch that has been summarised by vendor to pay all the purchases due.

Great, but now we want an review all the approvals as one last step before posting the Payment Journal.

This can be done manually on a line-by-line basis:

Lets see the documents that have been applied

Picking a single line we can click though to the document card

From the document card we can open the Approval entries

Approval entries

But even for small payment runs that's a lot of clicking, we just want a simple overview!

Get the data published as a web service

The relationships that hold this info together are:

[Gen. Journal Line].[Applied-to ID] = [Vendor Ledger Entry].[Applies-to ID]

That gets us from the payment journal to the line in the Vendor ledger entry; from there to link to the approvals its simply the document numbers:

[Vendor Ledger Entry].[Document No] = [Posted Approval Entry].[Document No]

Using that general info you can create a query object and publish to your SaaS instance of BC

It was necessary to exclude rows with a blank Applies-to ID as this is not a primary key and if you don't exclude you can end up matching blank to blank and get a lot of unwanted data!

Once pushed to BC this should be published from the Web Services page:

Grab the data into Power BI, create a layout and publish

Which can then be grabbed in PowerBI using the built in data source for BC SaaS

The Power BI layout I've gone with a very simple slider to pick the Payment Journal batch and a matrix table to show the Payment Journal document lines, related vendor ledger entry document numbers and values and naturally the approval details - where an approval was completed.

Once published the Power BI report can be surfaced in Business Central or accessed via a custom action from the payment journal page perhaps - something to look at next time...