Advanced approval

• 07/07/2025
• 9 minutes to read

As an alternative to standard purchase approval and approval flows in Continia Document Capture, in which approval routes are fixed and predetermined based exclusively on invoice amounts, advanced approval allows for a faster and more flexible approval process based on both invoice amounts and dimensions. This means that:

• You can define the dimensions that help to identify all approvers for any invoice that's sent for approval.
• The next approver isn't identified until the current approver has approved all relevant invoice lines.
• Document lines due to be approved by the current approver are marked in bold, both on the Purchase Approval Entries page in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and on the Continia Web Approval Portal.

The advanced approval concept is best explained using scenarios, which are provided below. Note that this article uses invoices for illustrative purposes, although the functionality works equally well with credit memos.

Advanced approval scenarios

For advanced approval, the dimensions you define – together with the invoice line amounts – determine who gets to approve any invoice sent for approval.

In these scenarios, an advanced approval group has been set up with the dimension Department Code applied, and the users Robin Bettencourt, Esther Henderson, and Otis Falls have been added as approvers. They have different approval limits for the two dimension values Production and Sales:

For descriptive purposes and ease of understanding, these scenarios are based on the one dimension Department Code and only three approvers in the approval group. However, you can have multiple dimensions and numerous approvers involved – adding both flexibility and complexity.

Scenario A

An invoice with the following line dimension values and amounts is sent for approval:

In theory, this invoice could be sent to Otis Falls for full approval, as he has permission and sufficient approval limit to approve both of the dimension values and, consequently, both lines. However, Otis Falls is the highest-ranking approver and Document Capture strives to burden high-ranking approvers the least. Therefore, the invoice is sent first to Robin Bettencourt, whose approval permission matches the dimension value of the first line (Production). When Robin has approved the first line, the invoice is forwarded to Esther Henderson – whose approval permission matches the second line (Sales). When Esther has approved the second line, the invoice is fully approved.

Scenario B

Another invoice with the following line dimension values and amounts is sent for approval:

For this invoice, none of the three approvers can approve all lines – so its approval has to be split between them. Robin Bettencourt has permission to approve invoice lines with the dimension value Production, but his approval limit of $25,000 is insufficient here, as the two Production lines (lines 1 and 2) come to a total of $40,000. For this reason, the first approver has to be Otis Falls, whose approval limit is sufficient for him to approve the first two invoice lines.

Although Otis also has permission to approve Sales lines, he's unable to approve the remaining invoice line because the total of the three lines would then exceed his approval limit. So line 3 must instead be approved by a second approver, Esther Henderson, who can approve Sales lines for up to $25,000. This is enough to cover the approval of this remaining line. With Esther's approval of line 3, the invoice is fully approved.

Four-eye approval scenarios

If you always want at least two approvers to approve invoices, enable the four-eye approval setting. This plays out differently depending on how you set it up. Using the same approval group as above, the following scenarios illustrate the different flows.

Scenario A

In this scenario, Invoice was selected when four-eye approval was enabled and set up.

An invoice with multiple lines that require multiple approvers is sent for approval. Since more than one approver is already required, four-eye approval is applied automatically, and there's no need for Document Capture to identify additional approvers. This is the case in scenarios A and B above, in which both invoices have multiple lines requiring multiple approvers. If four-eye approval had been enabled in these scenarios, the outcome would have been the same.

Scenario B

In this scenario, Invoice was selected when four-eye approval was enabled and set up.

An invoice is sent for approval, but this one only has one line:

Two of the approvers in the approval group have the required permissions and approval limits to approve this line: Esther Henderson (who can approve Sales lines for up to $25,000) and Otis Falls (who can approve Sales and/or Production lines for up to $40,000). As Esther has the lower approval limit of the two, she's identified as the first approver. When Esther has approved the line, the invoice is sent to Otis.

Scenario C

In this scenario, Invoice Full Amount was selected when four-eye approval was enabled and set up. Therefore, at least two approvers must approve the total amount of each invoice.

An invoice is sent for approval, this time with the following line dimension values and amounts:

Robin Bettencourt has permission to approve Production lines, and his approval limit of $25,000 covers both lines – that is, the total invoice amount – so he's identified as the first approver. When Robin has approved the two lines, the invoice is forwarded to Otis Falls, who also has the required permission and approval limit to approve both lines. When Otis has approved the lines as the second pair of eyes in the four-eye approval process, the invoice is fully approved.