Introduction

If you've come across Salesforce CPQ before, you've likely encountered the term "advanced approval." Salesforce CPQ's Advanced Approval is a robust tool that gives you more flexibility and efficiency in your approval processes. In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through a high-level overview of installing, configuring, and deploying Advanced Approval.

‍

‍

Key Features

1. Flexible Approval Flows: Salesforce CPQ Advanced Approval supports both parallel and sequential approvals, allowing multiple approvers to review simultaneously or in a specific order.
2. Smart Approval: Say goodbye to unnecessary re-approvals. Smart Approval in Salesforce CPQ Advanced Approval automatically determines the need for re-approval based on previous approval decisions and current quote changes, streamlining the process by bypassing unnecessary approvals.
3. Beyond CPQ: Though known for CPQ, Advanced Approval is not limited to CPQ objects.

Configure Advanced Approval

Setting up Advanced Approval for the first time might take some time, but Salesforce has some excellent documentation to walk you through it. Here are the high-level steps:

1. Installation: The Advanced Approval package can be installed from https://install.steelbrick.com/.

2. Permission Sets: After installation, you need to assign appropriate permission sets to users who will be working with Advanced Approvals. Assign the Advanced Approvals Admin permission set to yourself.

3. Email Service Setup: Set up an Email Service for Advanced Approval. Paste the email value into the Inbound Approval Email (Long) field on the configuration page within the Advanced Approvals package.
4. Field Configuration: Set up the lookup field on the Approval object. Configure necessary fields on the target object (e.g., Quote) that will be subject to approvals.
5. User Interface: Create buttons and update page layouts for initiating and managing approvals.

Key Objects

1. Approval Rule: Defines approver and email notifications. This is the heart of Advanced Approval.
2. Approval Condition: Specifies the logical statements that determine when approval is required.
3. Approval Variable: Aggregates data from child records for evaluation in approval conditions.
4. Approver: Represents the user or group responsible for reviewing and deciding on approval requests.
5. Approval Chain: Represents a series of approvals that must occur in a specific sequence, linking multiple approval rules together.
6. Email Template: Email templates are used for various approval-related communications, including approval requests, approvals, rejections, and recalls.

Deployment

You can recreate all your approval records in Production or use Data Loader, but Salto can make this process less painful.

1. To deploy the Advanced Approval configuration using Salto, you can select the Sbaa dropdown.

2. Make sure you manually update things like the Template ID field on the Email Template record and the Inbound Approval Email (Long) field on the Advanced Approval Configuration.

Hope that helps! See you on the trial!