When a user submits a time entry for approval in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, an “approval” record is created. There’s no REAL workflow, like there is in Dynamics 365 for Finance, so the approvals kind of just sit there. The way that a project approver is supposed to know which time entry approvals to approve is by filtering this list page.
I’m sure there’s more sophisticated ways of reviewing and approving time entries, but I think of two main approaches: line manager approved, or project manager approved.
Line-manager approvals
Managers are assigned to users. I can never find where this form is, so I always go to the “Advanced settings”–>”Security”–>”Users” form.
This form is where you specify the manager for a specific user. Make sure there’s a value here.
Next, you’ll want to go to the “Approvals” form and create a new saved view. Here’s one that worked for me:
As shown above, this filter looks at the bookable resource from the approval record, finds the associated user, and then filters that user record on where the current user is set as the manager.
Project-based approval
Maybe the line manager-based approval works well for internal time or non-billable approvals, but maybe your project managers need to approve time on projects that they’re marked as the project manager on.
In this case, we don’t care as much about the manager of the bookable resource. Instead, we care about the project approver records on the project team. To add a user as a project approver in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, navigate to a project and click the “Team” tab. Either select or add a record for a project manager and make sure the “Project approver” field is set to Yes.
Once you’re done there, go to the “Approvals” form again and make a saved view. Here’s the filter that I used:
I went through this previously in “Condition not executed because of missing relationship: msdyn_projectteam”., but here is it again.
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