Salesforce CPQ: Advanced Approvals Chains

Advanced Approvals allow users to leverage approval "teams" and trigger approval rules for them in a specific order, independently from other teams. You could have one chain for the Discounting team, one chain for the Legal team, another chain for the Finance team, and of course there can be "unchained" rules which don't belong to any specific team.

Defining approval chains is easy. When you create an approval rule, you can add it to an approval chain by populating the Approval Chain field on the Approval Rule record.

You have to keep in mind certain important things regarding approval chains when you submit any approval that has multiple approval chains and unchained rules. 

First, any approval chain can start at any step, not necessarily in Step 1. To achieve this, the first Approval Rule in the Approval Chain should start at a later step. 

If there are two approvals rules, both Unchained and Chained starting in Step 1, upon Submit for Approval, two approval records will be created, for each rule with the status of Requested.

However, if the Unchained Rule is in Step 1, and the Chained Rule is in Step 2, first the Unchained Rule will have to be approved, then an approval request will be sent to the approver of the Chained Rule in Step 2.

If there are 2 Unchained Rules: one in Step 1 and another in Step 2 and also several rules in a separate Approval Chain starting in Step 2, first the unchained rules will have to be approved, then an approval request will be sent to the approver of the first approval rule in the Approval Chain (also Step 2).

Similarly, if there are 3 Unchained Rules, in Steps 1, 2, 3 and also several rules in a separate Approval Chain starting in Step 2, first the unchained rules will have to be approved, then an approval request will be sent to the approver of the first approval rule in the Approval Chain (also Step 2).

Thus, to make sure that the Chained Rules don't depend on the Unchained ones, make sure they start in Step 1, although this, of course, is already a business call. 

Note that if there are two rules in the same step in an Approval Chain, both must be approved before advancing to the next step. 

The approval process is completed and the record is approved only when all chains complete their final approval steps.