How To Set Up Delegated Approver In Salesforce

Setting a Delegated Approver in Salesforce

Vacation. Sick leave. Out of office.

There will always be times when you cannot be giving your approvals your full attention. It is necessary to make sure your ticket, case or what have you are being taken care of and approved accordingly in your time of unavailability. Thankfully, Salesforce offers the functionality of setting a delegated approver, a user who can fulfill your approvals in your absence.

Problem

Setting a delegated approver, how e ver, is not always as straight forward as one would wish. Without other settings being in place, this process can lead to frustration and the functionality not working as expected.

Solution

There are three sides of the story that need to be set up properly in order to make sure this process works smoothly and as intended. Firstly, the admin has to make sure that the appropriate settings are allowed on the necessary approval process. Secondly, the user who will be unavailable has to set a user as his delegated approver. Lastly, the user who is the delegated approver has to make sure the proper settings are set in order to receive notifications for the approvals.

You, as the admin

In order for your users to be able to use the functionality of delegating their approvals to another user, it is your job, as the admin, to make sure that this option is enabled for the approval process at hand.

Let us make sure of this. Firstly, open your approval process. Within your approval process, open the editing page under the Approval Steps.

Once you have gotten this far, get yourself to Step 3. Here you will have to find a checkbox allowing delegate approvers to approve requests. Make sure this is checked.

The users in your Org are now able to assign themselves delegated approvers.

You, as the user

Once you know that your admin has done all the preparation, it is now your time to shine. To make a delegated approver active, a few settings have to be set not only in your user settings, but also in the settings of the user who will be your delegated approver.

Let's start out with your settings. To reach the appropriate settings, you first have to go to your account Settings by clicking on your Avatar.

Once you have this open, you will find the tab Approver Settings on the left hand side under My Personal Information.

Once you have reached this stage, you will be greeted with two options. Firstly, you can set the person who you will delegate your approvals to. By clicking on the lookup icon next to the field, a pop-up window will open. Here you search for and select the user you would like to set. Secondly, you can adjust when to receive notifications for approvals. There are four options:

If I am an approver or delegated approver
Only if I am an approver
Only if I am a delegated approver
Never

Depending on the settings of your system, you will either receive an internal notification, an email notification or a chatter post notifying you of a new approval request.

You, as the delegated approver

Now that you are set as somebodies delegated approver, we come to the most important setting of them all. Follow the steps above to get to the Approver Settings. Here it is crucial to set the notification settings, otherwise you will not be notified of any pending approvals. Out of the notification options, it is important to have either 1 or 3 selected.

Once the three above parts are set up as described, your delegated approvals will function without any issues!