Approval workflows in Business Central

Approval workflows in Business Central enforce that high-impact documents — purchase orders over a limit, customer credit overrides, payment journals, sales quotes — are reviewed and signed off before they post. The built-in engine is functional and easily extendable, with Power Automate available when you need to reach outside BC.

The workflow engine

Each workflow has a template that defines triggers (e.g. "Sales Document Approval"), conditions (lines amount above 50,000), and a sequence of response actions: notify users, set status to Pending Approval, send approval requests, escalate after delay, allow or block postings while pending. Approvers act from inside BC, from email notification links, or from Microsoft Teams cards.

Built-in templates

Microsoft ships templates for purchase quote/order/invoice approvals, sales quote/order/invoice approvals, customer overcredit notifications, payment journal approvals, and overdue payment reminders. A new tenant gets all of them; they're disabled by default and enabled as needed.

Custom workflows

A workflow designer page lets you copy a template and modify the trigger conditions, approver hierarchy (direct manager, named approver, workflow user group, sales/purchase amount approval limits), and response actions. Conditions support AL field filters with AND/OR logic. The same engine drives custom workflows from extensions.

Approval limits

Each user has a record in User Setup with approval limits — the maximum amount they can approve for sales and purchase documents. Workflows route up the hierarchy until a sufficient approver is found.

Workflow user groups

For more complex routing (e.g. project approvals routed to the project manager rather than the document creator's manager), workflow user groups define ordered or parallel approver sets.

Substitutes and delegation

Each user can name a substitute approver, so leave doesn't block business.

Power Automate as an alternative

For workflows that need to reach outside BC (Slack notifications, integrations to external systems, complex conditional logic), Power Automate cloud flows triggered by BC are a stronger fit. Microsoft ships actions for create approval, wait for response, update record. A pragmatic pattern: built-in workflows for posting controls; Power Automate for orchestrations across multiple systems.

Audit

Every approval action writes to the approval entries table — who approved, when, on what, with comments — and survives in the database for the life of the record.