Troubleshooting Approval Process Issues

This section lists some of the most common reasons that cause errors in the Approval process.

Invalid Data Error While Locking an Entity

You may receive the Invalid Data error while locking an entity. This error can occur because of these reasons:

• You did not lock the prior period of the target entity or its descendants.
• You did not lock the previous periods of the current year of this target entity or its descendants.

If you are using the Approval card to lock an entity, click the error message to view error details.

Invalid Data Error While Unlocking an Entity

You may receive the Invalid Data error while unlocking an entity. This error can occur if any of the future periods of the current year of this target entity or its descendants is locked.

If you are using the Approval card to unlock an entity, click the error message to view error details.

See Locking and Unlocking Entities.

Exception Error While Unlocking an Entity

You may receive the Exception error while unlocking an entity. One of the possible causes for this exception can occur when a user has changed an Approval owner during the approval process. When you change an Approval workflow in which the Approval Unit is already started, the workflow logic can become corrupted, causing unexpected issues.

Resolution: You need to define your workflow properly and then start the approval process. If there is a need to change owners, you must exclude the approval process and restart it, if you are in the process of locking the entity. To restart, from Manage Approvals, change the view to Tree view, search for the entity that is causing the error, set it from Start to Exclude, then set it to Start again.

Intermittent Failure During the Approval Process

Sometimes, approval process such as Lock, Unlock, Promote, and Approve fails intermittently.

Workaround: After initiating the action from the Approval card, do not refresh the page repeatedly. Wait for a while for the action to complete and then refresh the page.

Failed: Ambiguous Automatic User Error While Starting an Entity

Only a Service Administrators can start an entity for the approval process. The approval Start process assigns the owner for the entity and places it in the correct location of the promotional path. The Start process will not assign an owner to the target entity if both the following conditions are true:

• You did not assign an owner to the root level of the Approval Unit Hierarchy
• You did not assign an owner to the decendant entity within the root level

To avoid this error, ensure that at least one owner is assigned to the root level entity of the Approval Unit Hierarchy. This allows all descendants that do not have an assigned owner to inherit the owner assignment from the root entity.

See Assigning Approval Unit Owners and Reviewers.

Optimizing Approval Process Performance

The performance of the approval process depends on these factors:

• The number of forms that contain validation rules. Make sure you add as few forms as possible because during the locking and unlocking process, the form will be loaded for each descendant of the target entity.

• The design of the form. For best practices, see Best Practices for Forms with Validation Rules.

• The Validation Rules Options that you have selected for the form. See Including Data Validation Rules in Forms.