Soft4Lessee has several points at which approval workflows can help manage and curate lease management in a larger team. Let's overview how to properly set up approval workflows for Soft4Lessee.

How it Works

Soft4Lessee does not build its own approval engine - it plugs into the standard Business Central workflows.

Soft4Lessee workflows are driven by the Lease Status field. An approval request is essentially a gate between two statuses: the lease waits in Pending Approval or Pending Signing until an approver approves or rejects it.

The four Soft4Lessee workflows are created automatically when the extension is installed or upgraded, together with the workflow category for leases. You do not need to build them by hand.

Enabling Workflows

In page Workflows, enable the listed Soft4Lessee approval workflows. In the example below, all four workflows are enabled.

To enable or disable, select the relevant workflow, then tick or untick the Enabled field.

The four Soft4Lessee workflows are:

• Lease signing flow 
  • Handles approval of a brand new lease, before it is signed. Runs when a lease in status In deliberation is submitted for approval.
• Lease Re-open event listener
  • Runs when an Active or Extended lease is re-opened. Opens a fresh approval request and clears the previous approval request and change log for that lease.
• Lease changes event listener (while re-opened)
  • Runs every time a significant field is changed on a lease that is in Re-opened status. Records the change in the approval comments.
• Lease - request approval event listener (after done modifications)
  • Runs when the user presses Request for Approval. Sends the approval request to the approver.

They work as a set, so in most cases you will want all four enabled.

Adjusting Approval User Setup

You can manage which users can approve, and which ones can request approval, on the Approval User Setup page.

Add the users that are relevant. If the user row has an Approver ID applied, that means for all enabled workflows, they will send requests for approval to the user which is applied in Approver ID. In the example below, when user REDAS finishes editing a lease agreement, a request to approve will be sent to user USER_5A...

A user is treated as a final approver if their Approver ID is blank or Approval Administrator is ticked. 

The minimum working setup is two rows: one requester whose Approver ID points at the approver, and one approver with a blank Approver ID or Approval Administrator ticked.

Approval Requests in Practice

Let's go through the approval flow, when a newly created lease is signed - this is covered by the Lease signing flow workflow.

1. A lease is created and sits in status In deliberation. The requester fills in the lease terms.
2. The requester chooses Request for Approval on the Lease Agreement card. The lease moves to Pending Signing and becomes read-only for the requester.

1. Soft4Lessee creates an approval request for the lease and assigns it to the Approver ID from Approval User Setup.
2. The approver opens page Requests to Approve and either approves or rejects.
   1. Approve → the lease is signed: status becomes Signed, and the lease can then be activated as usual.
   2. Reject → the lease returns to In deliberation so the requester can correct it and submit again.

In other cases, for example, when an active lease is modified, the Comments section will list the adjusted field(s), as well as the old and newly applied value. Example below.

What the approver sees

The approver works from the standard Business Central pages:

• Requests to Approve - the queue of leases waiting on them.
• Approval Entries - the full history of requests per lease. Users without permission to read Lease Agreements do not see lease approval entries here.
• Approval Comments - the change log for the lease. Soft4Lessee adds two columns to this page, Old Value and New Value, so the approver can see exactly what was changed without opening the lease and comparing by hand.