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Expense Report Workflow Tutorial
This tutorial will show how easy it is to create an Approval Workflow using . We will use an Expense Report workflow as an example. Consider this business scenario:
- The employee accesses the Expense Report workflow and fills in the form, signs it and clicks Continue.
sends that employee’s manager a notification.
- The manager clicks on the notification [on any device], can view the expense report request and approve it or send it back for corrections.
- If approved by the manager and the total amount of the expense report is greater than $1000.00, the workflow will be routed to the VP for further approval otherwise it will continue to employees in HR for final processing.
Final processing might include integration with a database or with a back end system.
On This Page:
What You will need:
- The Approval Forms/Workflow application which contains a precreated Expense Report workflow. This workflow will be completed and functional by the end of this tutorial.
- A
account on the frevvo SaaS server or a working in-house installation.
Setup Users and Roles
We will need three roles to create and test the flow: Reviewer, Supervisor and Accounting. To create these roles in :
- Login to
as the administrative user for your tenant.
- On the page that is displayed, click the Manage Roles link.
- Click the icon and in the form that is displayed type Reviewer. Click Submit. Note that role names are case sensitive.
- Repeat for the Supervisor and Accounting third roles.
- Click the "Back to Manage Tenant" link at the top of the page.
The tenant admin will also need to setup a designer user to create and test the flow. We also need three additional users: a user with the Reviewer role, a user with the Supervisor role and a user with the Accounting role.
Click the Manage Users link.
- In the Alphabet at the top click All to display a list of the users in the tenant. Follow steps 4 - 7 to create four users:
- For each user, click the icon to add a new user profile.
- In the form that's displayed, fill in the information for each user.
- Assign the frevvo. designer role for one user, the Reviewer role for the next user, the Supervisor role for the third user and the Accounting role for the last user.
- Select the user's Reviewer from the Reports To drop down for the designer user. Make sure you select the user id for your user with the Reviewer role.
Click "Submit" to add the user.
Step 1: Download/Upload the Expense Report Workflow
Download the partially created Expense Report flow to somewhere on your hard drive.
Login to
as a designer user in your tenant.
Click the New button on the Application Home page. Create an Approval Forms/Workflow application.
The Approval Forms/workflow application will be added to the Application home page.
Step 2: Create the Workflow
In this step, we will create the Expense Report workflow.
Click the Edit button for the Approval Forms/Workflows application on the Application Home page.
Click the Flows tab. Browse to the Expense Report flow that you saved to your hard drive. Click Upload. Click the Edit icon for the Expense Report.
At this time, the Expense Report flow only contains the form named Expenses. The Expense report form was created using simple visual drag & drop and edited to achieve the desired layout. To view the form, click the icon on the flow designer toolbar.
There are sections in this form for the Reviewer, Supervisor and Accounting approvals. A business rule controls when these sections are shown/hidden as the flow progresses. For Example, when the employee is filling out the Expense Report, the Reviewer, Supervisor and Accounting sections are hidden.
Rules will be even easier to implement in a future release of
.
Other Business Rules autofill the Report Date, employee information and the Reviewer name using the credentials of the user who is logged in. Another rule enables/disables the Miles Travelled field based on a selection from the Category dropdown. There is a rule to calculate the mileage and a separate rule to calculate the expense report grand total.
Using the Linked Forms Feature of the flow designer, we can add a linked version of the parent form, Expenses, for each of the remaining steps in the flow. Click the Link icon three times to create three linked forms.
Click on the second step in the flow. Change the name to Reviewer, by typing it in the name field on the left step Property pane. Rename the third step in the flow, Supervisor and the last step Accounting.
Click the icon to save the flow.
Step 3: Assign Roles to the Workflow Steps
We will set up the navigation of the flow by assigning roles/users to the four steps:
Click the
Edit icon to return to the Expense Report flow.Select the step named Expenses. View the properties window on the left. A scrolling menu lists the available roles. Do not select a role for this step. This assignment makes the first step accessible to everyone in the
tenant.
Select the Reviewer step. This step will be performed by the employee's manager (Reviewer). We could assign the role, Manager, by selecting it from the Role dropdown list, however, this would put a notification in every manager's inbox as soon as any employee in the company filed an expense report. We want each employee's expenses to be approved/rejected by his/her manager and not by any manager. Instead of assigning a role, we will assign this step to a specific user.
can dynamically determine which user the notification should go to. In the Expense Report Form, there is a text control named "Reviewer." The Reviewer is simply the username of the manager in question. We can use the information entered in that control to forward a notification to the right reviewer. In the Properties window, just below the Role menu, type {Reviewer} in curly brackets as shown:
This is an example of a template in
. At runtime,
will evaluate the value of the data item (Reviewer), which is automatically filled in via a business rule.
will then send a notification to that specific manager only.
Assign the Supervisor role to the Supervisor step.
Assign the Accounting role to the Accounting step.
Click the
icon to save the flow.
Step 4: Add a Precondition for the Supervisor Step
Preconditions are used to add logic to your flow to skip or perform a step when the condition is true. Add a precondition on the Supervisor step that will route the workflow to the Supervisor only if the Grand Total of the Expense Report is greater than $1000.00. If the amount of the workflow is less than $1000.00, the workflow will skip this step and route the task to the Accounting step.
To add the precondition:
- Click the Edit icon to return to the Expense Report flow.
- Click on the Supervisor step.
- Type GrandTotal.value > 1000 into the Precondition field on the left step Property pane. GrandTotal is the name of the Total Amount control in the Expenses form.
- Click the icon to save the flow.
Step 5: Customize Notifications
The designer can customize the messages the users see, the task information that appears in the Task List, the messages the users see at the completion of each step, etc. We will supply some examples for you here but you can change these messages to say anything you want. Notice some control names are in between curly brackets. These are examples of templates - controls in your form that are evaluated at runtime and replaced with the actual value entered.
Follow the steps below to add some examples to the Expense Report flow
- Click the Edit icon to return to the Expense Report flow.