We recently reassigned finance approver roles due to organizational restructuring, and now invoice approval workflows are getting stuck at the finance approver step. The workflow shows “Awaiting Action” but the new finance approvers don’t see the approval tasks in their inbox.
Here’s what we changed: moved finance approval responsibility from the “Finance Managers” security group to a new “Finance Approvers - Billing” security group. We updated the user assignments and verified that the new approvers have the correct roles. However, invoices submitted after the change are not routing to them.
Interestingly, if I manually reassign a stuck task to one of the new approvers, they can see it and complete the approval. This suggests the security permissions are correct, but the automatic routing logic isn’t working. The business process definition for invoice approval still references the old “Finance Managers” group - could that be the issue? How do we update the workflow routing to use the new security group without disrupting in-flight approvals?
Before you update the business process, make sure your new security group has all the necessary permissions. The group needs not just the approval permissions, but also read access to billing data, access to the invoice business object, and the ability to view workflow tasks. Check the security group configuration and compare it with what the old Finance Managers group had. Missing permissions could cause tasks to be invisible even if routing is correct.
Another thing to verify is the workflow step configuration itself. Sometimes the routing rule is defined at the step level rather than using the security group directly. Check if the finance approval step has a “Route to” configuration that specifies individual positions or roles instead of the security group. That would override the group assignment.
You have two options for handling in-flight workflows. Option 1: Use the Workflow Task Reassignment utility to bulk reassign all stuck tasks to the new security group, then update the business process for future workflows. Option 2: Keep the old security group active temporarily, add the new approvers to it, process the stuck workflows, then switch the business process and deactivate the old group. Option 2 is cleaner and less risky. The key is not to deactivate the old security group until all workflows referencing it are complete.
Yes, that’s definitely your problem. The business process routing rules are still pointing to the old security group. You need to update the Invoice Approval business process configuration to reference the new “Finance Approvers - Billing” group. However, be careful with in-flight workflows - any changes to the business process won’t affect workflows that are already running.