Workflow and status on records - Nextworld Documentation

The steps in a process can be specific to your company. For example, the process for entries created in the Expense Report application can go through the following steps:

Draft—Identifies a new expense report that has just been created but isn't ready for review yet.
Accounting Review—Identifies an expense report that has been saved and is ready for review.
Ready to Post—Identifies a reviewed and approved expense report. During this step, Nextworld validates the record before automatically changing the status to Posted to GL or Error.
Error—Identifies an expense report that contained errors when it was validated.
Posted to GL—Identifies a completely processed expense report, that has a corresponding entry in the General Ledger application.

In the detail form, the workflow Status field is located next to, and can be updated by, the form action buttons. In the list form, the workflow Status field is the first column and can be updated with the row action menu. The options available in the row and form action menus depend on your role, and the process defined for the record. When you move a record between steps, it can impact records and other applications. For example, when you transition a record it can:

Create records in other applications— When the status of an expense report changes to Posted to GL, an entry is created in the General Ledger application.
Make fields inactive—When the status of an expense report has been moved to Ready to Post, the expense report can't be changed, except for the Memo field.
Run a background task—When the status of an expense report changes to Ready to Post, a background task runs that validates the record, and then changes the status to to Posted to GL or Error. You must wait for this task to complete before you can view the related entry in the General Ledger application.
Require an approval—When an expense report has a status of Accounting Review, an approval is required in order to change the status to Ready to Post. You can learn more in the Approvals for workflow status changes topic.

Approvals for workflow status changes

Records with a defined workflow may require a designated approver to approve a change in the workflow status.

Approvals help users control how a record moves through a process, and ensures all transitions are authorized. For example, entries in the Journal Entries application record business transactions that may require approval when a record is ready to transition from a Draft to an Accounting Review status. For this action, an approval request is sent to the designated approver to approve the transition.

View and manage approval requests

A user may have one or many approval requests they need to manage. This can be done through:

Approval Request application—Use this application to access all workflow approval requests. By default, this application is filtered to display only approval requests that you are the approving user for; however, you can use it to search for other approval request records.
- To view a record requiring your approval, select View Transaction from the row actions menu for an entry.
- For records that you are a designated approver for, use the Approve or Reject field to approve or reject the workflow transition for the record. You can add details about the approval or rejection in the Reason field.
- To find a specific approval request in the Approval Request application, use the Requester and Cycle Subject fields to filter the request records.
Form actions—Open the form actions menu and select My Approval to open a mini app to see records awaiting your approval.
Row actions—Select the approval option from the row actions menu to approve or reject individual records you are assigned to approve.

Workflow Change action

Use the Workflow Change row action in some applications to update the Status of multiple records at the same time, without changing forms.

To select multiple records, you can:

Select Adjacent Rows—Hold the SHIFT key, and then select the first and last records you want included. Records in between are automatically selected.
Select Multiple Rows—Hold the COMMAND/CONTROL key, and then select individual records.
Select All Rows—Use the select all checkbox in the header of the list form to select all the records visible on the page.

After you have selected the records that you want to update, open the row action menu and select the Workflow Change action to open the Workflow Change dialog box. The znwWorkflowInstance of the record which you select the row action from populates in the dialog box as the From znwWorkflowInstance.

Use this dialog box to select the workflow status which you want to change the selected records to. After you select a status, select the Apply Workflow Change button to update the znwWorkflowInstance of the records you selected.

If the group of records you selected have different workflow statuses, you must select a To znwWorkflowInstance for each of the From statuses. If you don't select a To znwWorkflowInstance, those records aren't changed.

If a record is in a status that you can't change, such as Done, the From and To statuses are disabled in the dialog box. If an approval is required to change a record to a specific status, that approval is still required. Use the Multi-Row Approvals action to approve the status change of multiple records.