I recently started getting involved with Salesforce, designing and implementing new approval processes for a custom object as well as the Contracts object. The Contracts object was some time ago renamed as "Teaming Agreements" as they started using it to instead track TAs (reason unbeknownst to me; we were talking recently about creating a new, separate TA object to separate it from Contracts functionality and use it as designed, but that is a whole different ball of wax...)
Anyway, my question has to do with the purpose of "activating" a Contract. Our current approval processes send a submitted TA (Contract) record through different approval gates, marking the built-in Status field with a value of Approval In Progress (Status Category = In Approval Process), and eventually - once the record has been approved by everyone in the chain - marking as Approved (Status Category = Activated).
This is all fine and good, though I am unsure exactly what the purpose of "activation" is. I recently learned that in our company, a TA which has gone through the entire approval process may later get modified and need to be resubmitted for people to re-approve the modified terms, using the same approval process. It does not seem that Salesforce allows an activated contract to be resubmitted, since a Contract cannot go from Status Category = Activated back to either Draft or In Approval Process from everything I have read. Is that accurate? No one here wants to create a brand-new record for a modified TA.
For those of you who are still awake after reading all that, my main question is: does the approval process really need to mark the approved contract as Approved/Activated at the end? If I don't, and leave the Status as a value with Status Category = In Approval Process (i.e. not activated), that would allow people to in the future modify the TA as necessary and resubmit it for approval. Given that we repurposed the Contracts object, I don't think we really use the activation function for what it was designed for anyway.
(FYI, because the Status field had become bloated with a bunch of custom values that reflected the "old way", yet the company did not want to lose any historical records, someone had created a new field called "TA Status" which allows people to see the current status - set through approval/rejection steps in the approval process. So the built-in Status field is really not what the users or approvers look at when trying to ascertain where the record is in the approval process)
I hope I've explained my situation and question clearly enough - let me know if there are other details which could help clarify what I'm doing and asking. Thanks in advance for your time and assistance!
Tres
3 respuestas
Hello Tres, The only time that the a status will go from In Approval to Draft is if a record is rejected in the approval process. Once the record has been Approved, it is not to be edited. This works by design because ultimately you should not want users to change records once approved. Some work arounds I can suggest:
- granting select users a permission set to modify all data for that object, but do note that you still won't be able to re-submit the record for approval the change would be made to an approved contract
- use Clone button to save some time when creating a new contract
Cloning Custom Object Records
https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=co_clone.htm
Cloning Contracts
https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=contract_clone.htm
I hope this information has been helpful. If this has helped resolve your issue, please let us know by marking the post as "Best Answer" to help others in the community with similar questions.
