A consultant designs the path — who approves, in what order, with how many days — and the modules send the requests. Approvers say yes or no in My Requests. Operations watch the Control Tower. The last approval makes the change real.
Life events, document reviews, carrier invoices and payments, direct billing, pay distribution changes, access requests, communication templates and programs: every request that needs a signature runs on one engine, with days allowed per step, someone to pass it up to, automatic approval when policy allows, planned stand-ins, and a complete history. Approvers come from your HR system — SAP SuccessFactors in real time, or Workday, UKG, ADP and Dayforce through the same connection.
"Think of Workflow as two rooms that must stay in sync. In the first, consultants and operations design templates, watch the Control Tower and set up stand-ins — the rulebook and the control room. In the second, employees and managers see the requests they started or must act on in My Requests — the inbox and the stamp. Workflow does not enroll anyone by itself: when the last step is approved it tells the life-event module, updates the invoice, changes the document status. The approval is Workflow's; the change belongs to the module that asked for it."
From an empty template to a request approved and applied: the ten steps a consultant, an employee, an approver and the engine take, with the one thing the platform insists on at each step.
| # | Who · where | What happens | The rule at this step |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Consultant Before the template | Makes sure the approvers, fallbacks and pass-up people exist as employees, and that the notice templates exist in Communication Hub. | A step can only name a real employee; a reminder can only send a real notice. |
| 2 | Consultant Workflow Templates › New template | Picks the kind of request — life event, document, invoice, payment, access request, message program — names the template and, where needed, narrows it to one life event or one document type. | One published general template per kind of request, so no request is ever without a path. |
| 3 | Consultant Step editor | Adds the steps in order: approver, label, due days (1 to 90), what happens when a step runs late — approve, reject, skip or pass up — what happens if the approver is missing, and the fallback person. | Pass-up needs a named person other than the approver. |
| 4 | Consultant Conditions · step 2 onward | For invoices, payments and access requests, adds a condition — an invoice over $10,000 gets a CFO step; a request for a sensitive group gets a second approver. | Conditions read the request as it was submitted, not the live employee record. |
| 5 | Consultant Contributors & reminders | Names watchers who may only view, and admins who may act on the approver's behalf; sets reminder days and how often they repeat. | View-only can never act. An auto-approve template switches reminders and stand-ins off. |
| 6 | Consultant Save, then Publish | Saves the draft, checks every step has a label, an approver and due days, then publishes. | Drafts are never picked when a request starts. Publishing a change never alters a request already running. |
| 7 | Employee · HR · Finance The business screen | Submits a life event, uploads a document, sends an invoice for approval, asks to join a group. The module starts the workflow and freezes the request as submitted. | One open request per person per kind (documents and compliance evidence excepted); the latest published template is copied in at that moment. |
| 8 | Approver My Approvals · request page | Approves, rejects with a comment, skips, or hands this one step to a colleague. | Only the current approver, their stand-in or an admin contributor may act, and only while the step is in progress. |
| 9 | The engine Between steps and overnight | Sends reminders on schedule, marks a late step and carries out the template's late action, opens the next step and applies any standing cover. | The clock starts when a step opens, not when the request was submitted. |
| 10 | Operations · the employee Control Tower · My Requests | Watches every request in flight; the employee sees their own. The last approval writes the change — the benefit record, the document status, the invoice — in the same moment, or the rejection tells the module no. | If the change cannot be written, the approval is undone with it. |
Follow Alex's marriage life event from the template a consultant published to the record the last approval writes — with a manager on leave, a reminder, a step passed up, and a Control Tower watching all of it.
A template names the kind of request, the approvers in order, and how many days each has. For every step the consultant chooses what happens when it is late — approve, decline, skip, or pass it up to a named person — and what to do if the named approver no longer exists: approve, hand to a fallback, or decline. Later steps can depend on the request itself: an invoice under $10,000 skips the CFO. Observers can watch (and, if they are admins, act in an emergency with a written reason). Templates can be specific — Marriage rather than any life event, one document category rather than all — with a general template as the safety net, and every change becomes a new version.
Every kind of request has a live path before go-live, so a request never fails for want of a template.
An assistant reads the template and points out weak spots — a single self-approving step, a pass-up person who is the same as the approver — before Publish.
Employees never open Workflow. Alex reports a marriage in Employee Home; the life-event module asks Workflow for the right template. Workflow checks the request, refuses a second open request of the same kind for the same person, picks the Marriage template (or the general life-event one), copies its steps and observers into a new request, starts step 1 with its due date, applies any planned stand-in, and freezes the request details — the dates, the dependent, the documents — so approvers see exactly what was sent. Then it tells the first approver through Business Rules and Communication Hub.
Approvers see one frozen request, not a record that kept changing while they read it.
Because the request is frozen, a condition looks at the amount, the reason or the category as sent — the same for an SAP entity and a Workday entity.
The current approver — or their stand-in, or an admin observer with a written reason — opens the request in My Requests, sees the frozen details, the story so far and the documents, and acts. Approve closes the step and notes whether it was on time; decline needs a reason and ends the request; skip needs a reason; hand off gives this one step to a named person, up to three times. Some requests carry their own guard: a life event cannot be approved while a dependent is still unverified. Observers see the same screen without the buttons.
Every approval carries a name, a time, on-time or late, and — for anything but approve — a reason.
HR can act on an employee's behalf from Employee Management; it is the same list, shown for that employee.
Two scheduled checks keep time. The reminder check reads each request's setting — once or daily, from a chosen day — and sends the message through Communication Hub. The overdue check finds steps past their date and does what the template says: approve, decline, skip, or pass it up to the named person and note it on record. Planned cover handles known absence: "Pat acts for me on life events from the 14th to the 26th" — limited to certain kinds of request, so invoices stay with Finance — and applied automatically when a step becomes live. A one-off hand-off covers the unplanned day.
A request has an owner every hour it is open — even when the approver is on a beach.
Passing a step up is a record, not just an email: who, from whom, when, and whether it was resolved.
When the final step is approved, the change happens at the same moment: the life event is applied and the dependent added, the invoice marked approved, the document status updated, the access granted, the template published. If the change cannot be written, the approval is undone — never an approval without the change, never the change without an approval. Declining tells the module the same way. Operations see everything in the Control Tower: in progress, overdue, passed up, reminders, average days, approved automatically, with filters, date ranges and a spotlight on risk.
An auditor reads the approval and the resulting record as one story, because they happened together.
An employee may cancel their own life-event request while it is in progress; nothing is written and the cancellation is on record.
The guarantees behind the template editor. Each one exists to keep an approval fair, on time and impossible to lose.
| Rule | How it works | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Designed here, started elsewhere | Templates are built in Workflow; requests are started by the life-event screen, the Document Center, billing, pay or Security & Access Control. There is no New Request button here. | The business screen owns the request; Workflow owns the approval. |
| One open request per person per kind | A second life event or invoice from the same person waits until the first is decided. Documents and compliance evidence are the exception. | No duplicate approvals and no contradictory answers. |
| The latest published version is copied at start | A request carries the template as it was the moment it started. | Changing a template never rewrites a request already in flight. |
| Standing cover is precise | "Pat approves my invoices while I am away" names the kinds of request and the dates. Cover for one step is a separate, one-off hand-over with a chain of at most three. | Cover is exact, not blanket, and every hand-over is on record. |
| Cancel is for life events only | Only the person who submitted a life event can cancel it, and only while it is still in progress. | An invoice or an access request that is partly approved cannot simply vanish. |
| The last approval and the change happen together | When the final approver says yes, the benefit record, document status or invoice is written in the same moment; if that write fails, the approval is undone. | Never an approved request without its change, and never a change without its approval. |
| Auto-approve is a template choice | A template marked auto-approve completes at once — including when the approver is the requester. | Low-risk requests do not sit in a queue. |
| Admin contributors act with a reason | An admin contributor may approve or reject on the approver's behalf; a reason is required and stored. | Cover in an emergency, without silent overrides. |
| Late steps are handled by the schedule | A step past its due date is marked late and the template's late action runs — approve, reject, skip or pass up — whether or not anyone opens the screen. | No request waits forever. |
Built for benefits approvals — life events with unverified dependents, invoices with thresholds, documents with categories — not a generic approval add-on.
Approvers in order, days allowed, what happens when late, who to pass it up to, fallbacks, observers and reminder settings; specific to a life-event reason or a document category; Check, Publish, Copy; every change a new version.
Steps that look at the frozen request — amount, reason, category — so the CFO sees the $50,000 invoice and not the $2,000 one; automatic approval where policy allows.
Known absence covered by stand-ins limited to certain kinds of request, with a date range and a reason; the unplanned day covered by handing a single step to someone, up to three times, each on record.
Scheduled checks send reminders once or daily through Communication Hub and handle late steps as the template says — approve, decline, skip or pass it up, with a record.
Employees and managers act in My Requests; HR acts on their behalf from Employee Management; observers watch, and admin observers can step in with a written reason.
Every request and step with counts, filters, time per step, a spotlight on risk and a complete history — and the final approval writing the change at the same moment.
Most benefits approvals still travel by email and spreadsheet, or in an HR-system workflow that stops at the HR system's edge. Here is what changes.
| Moment | Email and spreadsheet | BR Workflow |
|---|---|---|
| A life event is reported | HR forwards it to the manager and hopes. | The right template starts; step 1 is live with a 3-day clock and the request is frozen. |
| The manager is on leave | The request waits until they return. | Planned cover for life events already points the step at Pat. |
| Nobody acts for three days | Someone notices, eventually. | The overdue check passes it up to the HR partner and notes it — or approves it, if policy says so. |
| A $2,000 invoice | Same path as the $50,000 one. | The CFO step is skipped by condition; the $50,000 one is not. |
| Someone needs to override | A reply-all "approved" from a director. | An admin observer acts with a written reason, on record. |
| The last approval lands | HR retypes the change into the system. | The change is written at the same moment — or the approval is undone. |
| An auditor asks | Search the inbox. | History and Control Tower: who, when, on time or late, and the record it produced. |
Operations and approvers ask the same questions in different words: where is Alex's request, why is it late, who is covering Finance this week, what will happen if I approve. Athena answers from the request's own steps, history, cover and template — and drafts the cover or the template fix for a person to apply.
Templates with approvers in order, days allowed, fallbacks and versions — published before go-live, so every kind of request has a path.
Reminders, late handling and pass-ups on record mean a request has an owner every hour it is open.
Planned stand-ins limited to certain kinds of request — invoices to Finance, life events to HR — plus one-off hand-offs of a single step.
Threshold-based steps and automatic approval on the frozen request, so approvers see what matters and skip what doesn't.
The final approval and the change it causes happen together, or not at all — never a record without an approval.
Managers, HR partners and pass-up people come from SAP SuccessFactors in real time — and from Workday, UKG, ADP or Dayforce through HRIS Sync.
The screens are one path. A template is designed and published, a business screen starts the request, approvers act in order, the engine keeps the clock, and the last approval writes the change — on a platform where every record keeps its history. Four stories show the path in use, and a fifth shows it resolving an approver who is not in SAP.
Bring one approval you run by email today — a life event, a carrier invoice, a document review. We'll build the template, send a request from the real screen, hand a step off, let one go overdue and show you the Control Tower and the history at the end.
Approvals designed once, sent by the modules that need them, kept moving by clocks and stand-ins, and written to the record at the same moment — for your SAP SuccessFactors workforce and every part of the company on another HR system.