Salesforce has launched a new, free, orchestration-based Flow Approval Process tool in the Spring '25 release, replacing the outdated legacy system and offering enhanced capabilities for complex, multi-step approvals.
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have you ever set up an approval process
in Salesforce if you have you're
probably not a huge fan the old tool was
pretty bad and it has not been updated
for a very long time the administrators
have been asking for a revamp tool for
years now the product teams have
listened to our feedback and gave us a
brand new tool with spring 25 release
this tool is orchestration based it's
called the flow approval process
tool now I know you are going to ask
whether this tool is going to be free or
not because we know orchestrations are
free to use for up to 600 runs per year
they get deducted of your usage based
entitlements and after 600 runs you need
to buy additional runs from your account
executive these approvals are based on a
different type of orchestration
that don't get deducted of your usage
based entitlements which means they are
entirely free this product is ideal for
sophisticated multi-step approval
processes the way you set up
orchestration is a little bit
counterintuitive you first need to set
up your flows and you Stitch those flows
together using the orchestration
tool now salesource gave us a screen
flow template that you can use for your
approval step go ahead and start off
with that template build all the flows
necessary and then bring them together
using the orchestration tool let me give
you an
example what are approval processes
businesses can approve or decline
certain tickets and Records depending on
their business rule set like there are
certain scenarios where one department
will create a record and will send it to
another department or the executive team
for approval and then they can approve
or decline that record adding their
comments to the record as well as part
of this process a good example would be
if your business does onsite repairs for
equipment and assets uh certain
customers and certain clients would be
entitled to a free on-site repair and
certain others wouldn't and you know you
wouldn't want possibly your caller
Center agents to make that decision for
higher cost items you would bounce that
off to another team or the executive
team for that record or the ticket to be
approved so this can be on a case on a
custom object or it can also be on the
business or sales side for the
opportunities now in this use case what
I'm doing is I'm triggering an approval
process whenever somebody creates an
opportunity that's bigger than $10
million right maybe this is a
multinational and publicly traded
company and they want to keep their
pipelines very accurate and tight and if
one of the sales agents enters a big
whale a big opportunity that could
corrupt their reports right you know
they want to make sure that the
executive team uh or the next in line
should approve that
opportunity now I have set up this
process here I have a large opportunity
here that's for an $1 million I mean
this approval process Triggers on create
I'm going to clone This Record here and
I'm going to call it upsell large
opportunity 21 this time let me leave
the amount the same so when I do that
what happens is you see there's a work
guide item that appears on the record
record for this user by the way the
reason why I'm seeing this record is I
am the user designated to approve this
process and this is a screen flow that
shows an approve or reject radio here
and along with a long text area window
for the user to enter their decision
comments so I'm just going to go ahead
and approve this record and write in the
approved and when I click finish this
work guide item section will
disappear now the record moved along in
the process and as part of this new
approval process flow-based approval
process I am also creating a task that
shows on the record that this
opportunity has been
approved and as you you can see I have
also added here a comment on the bottom
that shows the um opportunity has been
approved this actually comes from uh the
decision comments that the user entered
the user who approved the
record all right so let me just show you
how this is achieved now first of all
let me tell you this is actually the
brand new approval process that just
launched with spring 25 it's flow-based
it's orchestration based and it actually
brings a lot of capabilities and
possibilities with it so to see what
process covers that I can just go to my
flow list view I have
already filtered here my orchestrations
I included the word orchestration in my
flow label and I'm filtering for those
orchestration that triggers based on an
opportunity being created with one
condition now remember this is a certain
type of
orchestration that is entirely free
usually orchestrations are free up till
600 runs a year after that you would
have to buy additional usage based
licenses for your orchestrations but
these approval orchestrations do not get
deducted of your usage based
entitlements so they are entirely free
here let me just go into my start
element and show you that this starts
when a record is created
right and when the amount is greater
than $10
million so
what does the orchestration do
orchestrations consist of stages and
steps each stage has to have at least
one step can have
multiple and each step will consist of
actions these could be background
actions or screen actions in this
particular approval based
orchestration it is only natural that we
add actually a screen flow that's made
out of a template that's best suited for
the approval step and I'll show you
where that template is and I I'll also
show you how I built this flow here now
under these parameters in settings you
are going to choose who the approver is
going to be your choices are User Group
Q or these can be also user Resource
Group resource and Q resource so the
assign could be actually a variable
value that you can assign
in this case this is
hardcoded and you can actually customize
the email that goes out to the user for
the approval
step uh the user will by default get a
standard email that has a link to the
record because um the record page layout
is where the work item will appear for
the user to do their approval they can
also approve by replying to the email by
the way
and then here I'm actually scoping this
approval step to the record where um
this work item is going to appear so
it's going to appear on this
opportunity um record page layout and I
have to also make sure that I add the
work item lightning component to the page
page
layout I can decide there as well
whether that work item uh lightning
component should show when there is no
work item to show for or it should be
hidden in my case I actually chose to hide
hide
it I can decide whether the record needs
to be
locked um and then I can also decide
whether I need to allow the approver to
edit the record for possible
Corrections and here is the interesting
thing here is where the possibilities
also get interesting I can decide um to
complete this step when the assigned
user has completed the action or I can
also choose among other choices one of
which could be for example when the
specified requirement is met or when the
specified evaluation flow returns
through so I can actually build a
sophisticated autol launched
flow um and when this flow returns the
value true then this step is going to be
considered completed so this can
actually get quite
sophisticated in my case I did not
choose to do that so after this stage
and step finishes I'm checking whether
the decision by the user is an approval
or not so this is a decision where I'm
checking the
output uh coming from that screen flow
in Step 1.1 and see whether that's an
approve now um the um standard template
for the approval screen flow has a um
pick list a string in fact the text that
Returns the word uh approve when the
record is approved so you need to be
checking for that you you're checking
for a text it's not going to be a
Boolean and that
actually field is called approval
decision it starts with all small
letters and only the D is capitalized
here right so it it has to be in a
particular way if you're not using the
template you can create your own screen
flow but it would have to have an output
named approval decision
here and you'll see there are two
outputs the other one is for approval
comments so that's the one that captures
the text that the user will
enter and once the record is approved I
can actually send it to another user
another que another group for another
approval step under certain conditions
or choose
to just create for example a task record
which I have done here so that's
actually done that's the power of
orchestration that's actually done with
the use of a Auto launch flow so this
Auto launch flow receives two inputs uh
one is the approval comments that comes
from Step 1.1 the screen flow and the
other one is the opportunity ID itself
and it's going to create a task and
opportunity and um remember um let me
also just remind you that um for the
start of the step I get to also use
either conditions or even an auto launch
flow to decide whether this step should
start or
not and the other power of
orchestrations is that the
orchestrations can run things in
parallel as well so that's another power
that we can use of orchestrations now
here is the difference between the
approval orchestration and the regular
orchestration when you are in
orchestration Builder and you want to
add a step let me just show you here you
are going to see a background step and a
UI step like a screenflow step but here
the only screen flow step that you can
set up is called an approval step right
so so it's um going to be limited to
approval interactions in terms of
background steps you are um more
flexible so you can actually add those
using a Noto launch flow here and the
orchestrations now they also have a m
soft step if you choose to add a moft
step in your orchestration so that's how
this one is built but remember though
this is going to be kind of
counterintuitive you have to build these
flows first and then you're going to
come back here and then finalize your
orchestration and here is my approval request
request
orchestration before I go into that let
me just show you where the template is
so if you go to new flow and then you
decide to use a template
template
and you can see on
templates approval workflow evaluate
approval request if you click on that
one you're going to
create an evaluate appr approval request
flow here so of this template and this
one actually comes with these required
variables already created a good thing
for you and you know you can obviously
customize this you will see that you
cannot save it once you make a change on
it you are going to be able to save this
one as a new flow as your own flow you
cannot really modify the template that's
why this one looks like um you cannot
save it at this
point so if I go back to the one I built
of this template and that's going to be
this one the um active
one it looks actually pretty much
exactly the
same you'll see I have not made any changes
changes
here and the variables are here approval
comments um an approval decision you'll
output and let me show you the auto lach
flow that creates a task and that's
here this one just simply creates a task
with the due date of current date the
description comes from the description
variable which is marked available for
input uh status is going to be completed
always subject is going to be
opportunity has been approved and the
related to ID is going to be the
opportunity ID variable which is also an
input you can see that here available for
for
input and this one is also available for
input all right so
so
now let me actually show you a couple of
other features and play around with this
a little bit further now first of all
what I want to show you is that we
received a new lightning app called
approvals with this release spring 25
release if you click on home this comes
with it with its own buttons here manage
all approval workflows review my
approval work items manage my approval
submissions there are some settings here
that takes you to the settings use standard
standard
approvals send approval work item
assignment emails to
approvals and send approval submission
status email notification to submitters
so you can actually turn these off and
on right and if you go back to this app
here it's going to have list views of
submissions and
also manage all approval workflows here
you can list all the
orchestrations and these are all
recorded on custom objects so you can go
to an or stration you can see the orchestration
runs this one is the record triggered
one I was playing uh with an auto launch
one so the record triggered one is where
I have
runs and you'll see that if I go to a
particular run I can see whether it's
completed it's in progress or it's in error
error
status and under related lists I see
even more detail the orchestration stage
runs step runs orchestration run logs work
work
items who received it who was this
assigned to everything is
recorded reportable there is a a great
audit Trail here right you know you can
see transparently what you have in terms
work and um you can also go to
orchestrations by the way you know
you'll see see here in your um waffle
menu the orchestration Run orchestration
work items and the orchestrations these
are going to also hold information for your
your
approvals so that's in a nutshell how
the approvals work here folks go ahead
give it a try and let me know what you
think about this new Tool uh whether you
are motivated to implement it in your
Orcs and uh how you plan on using it
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