How to Configure Multi-level Approval Workflows for JotForm

Approval processes can quickly become complex. Often, multiple people and departments need to review a single request, set of data, or piece of content. In these cases, it’s more important than ever to ensure your approvals are well coordinated and managed as efficiently as possible. This is where multi-level approval workflows come in.

Each Workflow for JotForm action is a single approval. Actions are triggered by a JotForm and reviewed in Slack and/or email where they can be approved, denied or reassigned. In this tutorial, we will teach you how to link individual actions together to create multi-level workflows.

Think of actions like building blocks. You can link them together to create workflows for your team’s specific needs. You can create workflows with any number of approval layers and trigger other workflows based on the outcome of the request.

Step One: Set up your Actions

To begin, create an action for each layer of your workflow. We will later connect these actions in step two. For our example we will create a Research and Development Proposal review, reviewed first in email and then in Slack.

Create the first-level action

Create an action which will serve as the first level of your workflow.

If you need a quick refresher on creating actions, check out these how-to articles:

• Email Action Assembly Guide
• Slack Action Assembly Guide

In our example, we want our approval to be reviewed in email first so we click “Create Action.” Then, we complete steps 1–5 to select our approver, link JotForm variables, and customize the messages approvers will receive for the request and each potential outcome of this layer of the approval workflow. These steps are explained in detail in two articles linked earlier.

This window in Workflow for JotForm should pop up as soon as you click “create” in your action. Otherwise, you can open it by clicking the “i” button on your action. Copy the webhook.

Navigate to your form’s settings, go to “Integrations,” and then search for “Webhooks.” Paste in your webhook.

To complete the action, we will copy the webhook into JotForm.

To avoid confusion, we rename the action “Level 1 Research and Development review.”

Setting up additional workflow levels

Create an action for each additional layer of the workflow. For our example, we will create a Slack action and label it, “Level Two Research and Development Review.”

The only difference between this action and the first action is that you should not copy the Workflow for JotForm webhook from this new actions into your JotForm settings. This final step of action setup isn’t necessary with your second action since it will pull your form submission information from the first action in your workflow.

Step Two: Linking your Action

Edit your first level action by clicking the pencil tool. In our example, this was “ Level 1 Research and Development Review.” Navigate to steps 4–5, approval and denial.

At the bottom of the page, click the “target action” dropdown and select your second level action. In our example this is the “Level 2 Research and Development Review” action we created earlier.

To create a simple multi-level approval workflow where any completion of the action triggers the next action in the workflow, repeat this step for both approval and denial. It is also possible to choose to have approval and denial outcomes trigger different actions, branching as many times as required to match the complexity of your workflow needs.

We hope this how-to article helps you build the custom workflow approvals your team needs to work smarter together.

For personalized support, please email us a support@workflowforjotform.com.