Approve travel requests

What’s it handy for?

Quickly implementing an approval process for new standards and procedures at your company – especially if the process is temporary, or when you lack the resources to build it into your system of record.

A few uses for this workflow:

• Managers: manage and organize a team’s requests in one central location
• Sales: request approval to visit key accounts during times of travel restriction

For an approval process, you’ll create multiple workflows that operate in tandem. With one workflow, people will use a shortcut to submit a request for approval. The other workflows utilize the reaction-added trigger to ask follow up questions, approve/deny the request, or route to a private channel for discussion.

To get started:

1. Download the example
2. Navigate to Workflow Builder and select “Import”
3. Once imported, edit the workflow to make sense for your team
4. Create additional workflows as needed
5. Publish your workflows, and let everyone know about your masterpiece

See it in action:

1. Creating and publishing these workflows takes less than 30 minutes. For this example, you will start by importing the downloadable template, selecting a channel for the workflow, and customizing the form fields to gather relevant information for the request. You can also include a message sent directly to the person who has submitted the request to inform them of next steps, an estimated response time, and provide a copy of their responses.
2. Next, you’ll create a second workflow using the reaction-added trigger. Choose a reaction to use on the form response that is posted in the channel. If you want to prompt people to get their manager’s approval before proceeding with the review, you can use a reaction that sends a message to the Message thread.
3. Repeat step 2 for each reaction that you want to use to indicate approval status. Add a reaction trigger for an approved request, and one for a denied request.
4. Publish all of your workflows.
5. The Request travel exception form can be launched by anyone in the channel using the shortcut menu.
6. Once the form is submitted, the workflow posts the request in the channel.
7. Reviewers can add reactions to the request message in order to route the travel request through their approval process.