Managing Workflow Approval Criteria


Helios uses Workflow Approval Criteria to route workflow steps. These will allow you to direct the workflow to the appropriate person based on your district-specific needs. Criteria can be set up for each individual step and also can be reused across steps and workflows. An easy way to determine if a step needs approval criteria is to simply ask, "who approves this step?" If the answer is "well it depends", then most likely you need to set Approval Criteria.


1. The first thing we need to do is reveal the menu drop-down options.

2. Next, select Workflow Designer.

3. Click here

4. This window contains all of your existing criteria.

You can see that they are ordered alphabetically by approval type.

NOTE: Depending on how many approval types you have configured this list can get very long. You can use the search box found near the top of this window to find specific criteria more easily.

By clicking on one of the criteria, its details will be displayed in the Criteria Details screen to the right.

5. The Search Box can be used to easily review criteria based on a number of options.

6. Click here

7. Click on the Search Filters box to reveal additional filtering options.

TIP - Ever wonder which user is assigned to which criteria? Give the Approving User dropdown a try and instantly filter your criteria window to only contain criteria containing that user.

8. To add a new approval type, click the dropdown field to see your current option and an add new section will appear at the bottom.

9. Add New Approval Type Name and Click Add Item

10. Choose a workflow type here, ONLY if you wish to apply these criteria to a specific workflow and not to ALL workflows.

If you would like this criteria to apply to multiple workflows, leave this space BLANK.

11. You can add Approvers for these new criteria by using the dropdowns. You can have 1, 2, or 3.

What this means is that for these criteria, any of the approvers (1, 2, or 3) can approve this step. Only one approver needs to approve in order for the workflow to progress, not all of them.

NOTE: It is important to understand that our last step created an approver type. In this step, we are starting to create the first approval criteria belonging to that approval type. An approval type may have many criteria associated and only 1 approval type can be assigned to a workflow step.

12. Here you can choose group(s)/roles of approvers in addition to the selected approvers.

These criteria would then be routed to all users in these roles in addition to the individual approvers.

13. You can add additional criteria for your approver based on Location or Funding Codes, Employee Details Criteria, or Criteria based on Form field values or even Onboarding Packet type, it's customizable to your needs.

In our example, we select Employee Type = Certificated because, in our test, we have one HR analyst who handles all our certificated staff.

14. Specifying options from the exclusion criteria to will exclude that specific field from the workflow approval criteria.
For this example, we will NOT be specifying fields from the exclusion criteria.

15. The Custom Approval Criteria Builder allows you to easily create advanced filters for criteria.

Clicking on the + Add New Criteria button opens a list of all Fields that can be filtered on.

Add any number of Filters to route this Workflow step as needed. In this example we're identifying Funding Account, Goal Code, and Job Class