Limits and considerations
Like any other platform feature, approval processes come with limitations (with great powers come great responsibilities, after all!). The following limits refer to the winter 2020 platform release:
- Total active approval processes per org: 1,000
- Total approval processes per org: 2,000
- Total approval processes per object: 300
- Steps per process: 30
- Actions per section (initial submission, final approval, final rejection, recall): 40
- Maximum number of approvers per step: 25
- Maximum number of characters in approval request comments: 4,000 (for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean the limit is 1,333 characters)
Approval submission is a manual operation. The user must click the Submit for Approval button to start the approval, but with a process builder (or Apex code) you can automatically start an approval process when specific conditions apply (for example, if the opportunity has not yet been submitted and we are approaching the Closed Won stage). We’ll look at this in the next chapter.
To close this chapter, one last suggestion: if you need a more dynamic way to link approval requests to approvers (and the approval step definition wizard or the hierarchical relationships on the user object are not enough), refer to this great post by Automation Champion about dynamic approval routing at https://automationchampion.com/tag/dynamic-approval-process-in-salesforce/.
For more details about approver limitations, refer to Salesforce Help at https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=approvals_considerations_approver.htm&type=5.
Summary
In this chapter, we learned about a key process automation feature: approval processes. Using these, we can let our low-level users create business-critical records and make them mandatorily submit each record for approval if some conditions on the record are met. This ensures that their managers can review record data and decide whether the record should be approved (and continue the business flow) or rejected (by requiring some changes before the flow can continue). Throughout this chapter, we learned how to master approval process creation by using the creation wizard. Then, we learned how to add approval steps and configure their criteria and approvers, and then how to configure actions to be automatically executed on the approval or rejection of the approving record. We finally learned how the whole approval flow is executed on the Salesforce user side.
In the next chapter, we’ll be dealing with workflow rules 2.0, or Lightning Process Builder, to increase the automation power of your data flow.