How Email Approvals Work inside Salesforce

Recently I've been learning more about approval processes.

Approval process offer an out-of-the-box solution for handing a record back and forth between team members.

It lets a team member evaluate a record, and then approve or reject it.

The date/time of approvals are automatically tracked, and a built in notification system is available to alert approvers when it's their turn.

Approval processes can be helpful for expense reimbursements, discount approvals, time off requests, and more.

And the built in Salesforce toolkit gives you a leg up on building out solutions in any scenario where back and forth record reviews are required.

A feature I didn't know existed (until recently) is the ability to approve or reject records by email.

When a record is submitted for approval, the approver gets an email alerting them that "they're up".

Normally they'd need to log into Salesforce and click a button to approve or reject the record.

However, by enabling this setting under Process Automation, approvers can respond with the words APPROVE, APPROVED, YES, REJECT, REJECTED, or NO and Salesforce will use that to approve or reject the record.

This is perfect for when approvers need to handle approvals on-the-go where they can't log in to Salesforce.

Salesforce is even smart enough to record additional comments from the approver in a comments field on the approval record.

I didn't realize this functionality was present and was impressed when implementing it for a client this week.

Figured it might be useful for you somewhere down the road.

And that's a wrap!

Today we a covered broad outline of approval processes and a specific email approval feature that is really useful.

Thanks for reading!

Best,

Nick