If you require any sort of approval within your organisation, which needs to be tracked, monitored, and audited, then People data update flows are for you! It’s also an excellent way of advancing your expertise with Bob, allowing it to be a single source of truth within your business, and is a perfect example of just how customisable our Employee Fields are.
Examples of these approval flows could be for:
- Expenses,
- Training Certificate/Renewals,
- Work from Anywhere Requests,
- TOIL/Overtime
- And many more.
Setting these up is a lot easier than you may think.
In this guide, I will talk you through how to Set-up a People data update flow, and then how to report on it too.
Setting up a People data update
Firstly, we need to create Custom Fields/tables by navigating to:
- Settings> Data Management> People's data fields:
Please note: when you create a custom field, it is automatically hidden from all in Permission Settings, so you will need to make this viewable, in order to add it to a People data update flow.
I will be using Training Requests for my example of a self service flow.
Here is also an example for Expenses:
- In this case it's a table as it allows the employees to keep adding expenses and have a log of all their expenses:
Create the new fields, which will then be subject to approval, as seen above. I would recommend adding as many fields as needed, and making relevant fields mandatory if it is required for the approval.
Once you are happy, it's time to define the permissions, navigate to:
- Settings > Account > Permission groups > All people-own data > People
- Select your new category's name
- Allow it to be viewable, but not editable
The next step involves creating the People update flow, to do this, click into:
- Settings > Flows > People data updates
- Next Create template
- Add a name for your flow and set who the flow should be available to
- Click Next
- select the new custom category you have created
On the final page make sure you assign:
- Approvers & Notifiers
- Associated task list to trigger based on the completion of the approval
We would recommend adding a number of roles to the notifications, especially if numerous team members are involved.
Once you are happy with the above, and have assigned a task list (or toggle it off and create a new one after, then add it into the flow), press ‘Done’.
The final step is to grant employees the permission to trigger this flow for themselves.
You can do this by heading to:
- Settings > Account > Permission Groups > All people — own data > Tasks and flows > Toggle on the permission for the specific flow:
After this, the flow is up and running and employees will be able to request it!
It’s always best to test out the new flow you can do this by logging in as another employee:
- click into their profile
- Actions > Update profile
- And select the flow you just created:
Then fill in all the necessary details and press next:
You will see the summary of the changes and you can press Done:
After this, the employee will have a banner at the top of their profile mentioning there are approvals pending:
If they click "View approval flow", they will see their request and its status:
You can also log in as the approver and reject or approve, by heading to:
- Org > My pending approvals > and clicking the request:
Reporting on a self-service flow
As mentioned previously, the ability to set-up People update flows can really advance and automate approval processes.
However, it's crucial that as a business you can report on, and audit this.
We suggest creating a Change-tracking report for such cases.
You can then, add in your additional custom fields as trackable fields.
You could then schedule this as a weekly report sent to the HR Team/Departmental Leads.
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