Submit for Approval

Some logged incidents and services require approval before technicians can proceed with resolving them. The Submit for Approval option enables you to send an email notification to approvers.

Incident requests in general do not require approval, but service requests may have to go through several approvals. These approvals are usually configured under the service workflow.

Submit Requests for Approval  

Role Required: Users with Adding Approvals permission.

You can submit a request for approval from the request details page. Apart from the multi-level approval process, the steps to submit approvals for incident and service requests are similar.

1. While submitting request approval for the first time, go to Actions > Submit for approval in the request details page.

2. Specify the To address. You can specify multiple email addresses also.

3. The email's Subject is auto-populated. You can edit the subject if necessary.

4. Enter your message in the Description field.

5. Click Send.

After the request is submitted for approval, a new tab called Approvals will appear between Work Log and History. Subsequently, you can submit approvals for requests and add approval levels for service requests from the Approvals tab. You can view vital details about the approval such as approver names, approval statuses, date and time of approval, or comments from the approver.

The SDAdmin can enable the Approvals tab for requesters under Admin > General Settings > Advanced Portal Settings > Approval. To learn more, click here.

Perform Approval Actions  

Role Required: Organization Roles, Users with Service Request Approver permission enabled.

You can record your approval-related decisions in the Approvals tab of the request details page.

• Click Take Action on the approval level table.
• In the new window, a preview of request details will be displayed. At the bottom of the page, you can add your approval decision.
•  If you need any details or clarification, enter your comments in the text box and click Need Clarification.
• To record your approval decision, click Approve or Reject. You can add any comments if needed.

Ask for Clarification:

You can ask for information before performing any approval-related action using Need Clarification option as explained above. This will move the request approval to Pending Clarification status.

If you have requested clarification, the approval process will be paused until the requester replies. The various exchanges between the approver and the requester will be grouped under the relevant approval level, with the latest replies and clarification questions listed on top. These details will be displayed in a read-only format on the Approvals tab in the request details page.

You can preview and follow up on the clarifications from the Home page.

1. On the Home page, find the My Approvals widget.
2. Under Request Approvals, select the request that you need to preview or ask for clarification.
3. The request details and the approval status will be displayed on a slide-out panel.
4. Click on the Pending Clarification banner to scroll to Approver Conversations. The latest clarification question will be listed on top.
5. Hover over a question and click Reply to respond to the conversation. You can also edit your last question by clicking Edit.

• If the requester has provided the necessary information, you can check Resolved (Requester provided the clarification) while replying to a conversation to move the approval status to Pending Approval.

Use the New Clarification button to start a new conversation thread. If multiple approvers have raised several clarification questions, use the icon to filter the conversation based on approvers.

For multi-level approvals, use the Previous Conversations button to view the clarification queries in previous approval levels.

After the requester has resolved your clarification, you can perform approval actions to move the request approval to Approved Status.

Provide Clarification:

As a technician, you can provide clarification for requests that you raised from the Home page.

1. On the Home page, find the My Summary widget.
2. Click Need Clarification category in the widget.
3. The requests awaiting clarification from you will be listed on a slide-out panel.
4. Use the left pane in the slide-out panel to switch between multiple requests awaiting clarification.
5. In the Approver Conversations tab of a request, the questions raised by the approvers in the current approval level will be listed with the latest question on top. Hover over a question and click Reply.
6. Enter your clarification in the text box.
7. If all the approver questions are addressed, you can select the Resolved check box to mark the conversation as settled.
8. Click Add Reply.

If multiple approvers have raised several clarification questions, use the icon to filter the conversation based on approvers.

Use the Previous Conversations button on the right corner of the Approver Conversations tab to view the clarification queries in previous approval levels.

Add/Delete Approvers 

Role Required: Technicians with Adding Approvals or Deleting Approvals permission.

You can add or delete approvals from the Approvals tab. The approvers should possess an email address in the application.

Add Approvals

1. Click Add Approvals in the approval level table.
2. Specify the email address of the approver in the To field.
3. The email's Subject is auto-populated. Edit the subject if necessary.
4. Enter your message in the Description field.
5. Click Send.

Delete Approvals

You can delete approvals from any level before the approvers record their decisions.

1. Hover over an approval and click  icon beside the approval status. The icon will not appear if the approvers have already recorded their decisions.
2. Click Delete in the pop-up.

Configure Multiple Stages of Approval 

Some service requests may require approval from several ranks of authority. In such cases, you can configure multiple levels of approval.

Multiple levels of approval can be configured for service requests in two different ways:

From the workflow of a service request 

Role Required: SDAdmin or HelpdeskConfig

Usually, the multiple levels of approval in a service request are configured in the workflow of the service item.

1. Go to the Workflow tab of a service request template.
2. In the Approval section, you can configure up to 5 levels and add role-specific approvers.
3. By default, approval from any one of the approvers will be applied. If all approvers in any of the levels reject the service request, the request will not proceed to the next level. Under Approval Configurations, you can select if you want to apply the first approval action or if you want all the approvers to approve. 
4. You can choose to Send approval notification automatically when a service request is raised. Otherwise, you can manually send the request for approval from the request details page. If you have configured multiple levels of approval, the notification is sent to the next level only if it is approved in the previous level.
5. You can choose to assign technicians to the service request only after the request is approved.

From Request Details page 

Role Required: Users with Adding Approvals permission.

By default SDAdmin, HelpdeskConfig and SDSiteAdmin have permission to configure multiple stages of approval from the request details page.

• In the request details page, go to the Approval tab.
• Click New Level beneath the approval level table. You can add up to 5 levels.
• Enter the approvers' name in the Approvers combo-box.
• Click Add.

After adding an approval level, select the approvals and submit them.

Request Auto-approval 

Sometimes, the same approver is configured in several levels of a request approval. Therefore, the approver has to revisit the request to approve it on several occasions. In such cases, you can configure auto-approval action for requests.

The SDAdmin or HelpdeskConfig can configure request auto-approval in the Self-Service Portal settings. To learn more, click here.

Requests can be auto-approved when:

• The approver has already approved the request in one of the previous stages (or)
• The approver is also the requester.

Resubmitting Approval Notifications

Role Required: Users with Adding Approvals permission.

If an approver has not yet taken any action on a request, you can re-send an email notification to the approver.

To resubmit an approval notification,

1. Go to the Approvals tab on the request details page.
2. Select the approvals using the check box beside the approval level table.
3. Click Send for Approval.
4. Modify the approval notification message if needed
5. Click Send.

In case of multi-level approvals, reminder notifications cannot be sent for an approval level if the previous level has any pending approvals