Email Notifications

  • 31/01/2025
  • 7 minutes to read

Using Continia Expense Management, you can make sure that approvers are notified by email whenever they need to carry out an approval action in Expense Management or the Continia Web Approval Portal, such as approving, rejecting, or canceling a document. You can notify the approvers either manually or automatically using job queues.

If necessary, you can even customize the actual emails as you please.

Important

In order for Expense Management to be able to send notification emails, you must configure an email account first. You can do this using the assisted setup guide:

  1. Choose the Search icon, enter Set up email, and then choose the related link.
  2. Follow the on-screen instructions to set up the email account.

Note

By design, Expense Management doesn't support standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV/Business Central notifications.

Instead, we recommend that you set up a status email job queue (codeunit 6086313) to run quite frequently, for example every 10-15 minutes. This ensures that approvers are continuously reminded about any potential new approval entries, even if they take instant action and approve everything right away for each notification. The codeunit is designed to only send out notification emails whenever a new approval entry has been created. In case of no new approval entries, no email is sent for 24 hours.

To send status emails manually

You can easily send status emails to approvers whenever you find it necessary to notify them that there are documents pending their approval. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Choose the Search icon, and enter Send Status email to Approvers.
  2. Select Send Status email to Approvers (EM).

Emails are now sent to all approvers that have pending approval requests. Each email will contain a table with all documents pending approval and a link to the approval client that the recipient of the email has been configured to use for approving documents (either Expense Management or the Web Approval Portal). The approval client will then display all remaining approval requests that haven't already been taken care of for that day.

Note

Whenever a status email is sent to an approver, this is logged by Expense Management, which uses the information to determine when to send out additional notifications: The first time the status-email process is run on any given day – whether manually or automatically using job queues – an email containing all documents pending approval from the approver is sent to that approver. However, any subsequent process runs on the same day will only result in the sending of status emails to the approver if new approval requests involving that approver have been added since the first process run.

To send status emails using job queues

It's also possible to have status emails sent to approvers automatically using job queues, so you don't have to worry about notifying the approvers manually yourself.

For more information and details on how to do this, see Setting up Job Queues.

As with the manual method described above, each email that's sent using a job queue will contain a table with all documents pending approval and a link to the approval client that the recipient of the email has been configured to use for document approval (Expense Management or the Web Approval Portal), and the approval client will display all remaining approval requests for that day.

To customize notification emails

You can easily customize certain parts of the emails that are sent to approvers, including their default subject lines and the actual text they contain.

To customize notification emails, follow these steps:

  1. Choose the Search icon, enter Expense Management Setup, and then choose the related link.

  2. To change the subject line of the notification emails, go to the Email FastTab. Under Reminder Email, select Approval Email Subject, and then enter the text you want to be displayed as the email subject.

  3. If you want to import a custom HTML template with, for example, different text and formatting than the default template, go to the action bar and select Actions > Email > Import Approval Template, and then open the HTML template that you want to import.

    Tip

    The Expense Management installation package comes with a status email HTML template that you can edit and use as a basis for your own custom template. It can be found here: [drive]\Support Files\Document Capture\Other.

    Note that if you do create your own custom template, you must keep the two keywords #DOCUMENTS# and #APPROVALFORMLINK#. When creating the notification email, Expense Management will replace these two keywords with a list of all relevant documents for approval and a link to the relevant approval client.

    Note

    If you don't import your own custom HTML template, Expense Management will use the default template, which has been hardcoded in a text variable in the CEM Expense Approval E-mail codeunit.

    In case a custom template has previously been imported and you wish to use the default template instead, you can delete the imported template by following these steps:

    1. On the Expense Management Setup page, in the action bar, select Actions > Email > Delete Template (only visible if a template has been imported).
    2. A dialog box asks if you want to delete the template. Select Yes to delete the previously imported template and revert to the default.

See also

Expense User Setup for Expense Management