Approval Requirements have been improved to support more flexible product and customer matching using existing Advanced Rules.
This means you can now apply approval logic to groups of products - such as those sharing a tag, category, group, or attribute - rather than relying only on individual product entries.
This is particularly useful for orderline quantity approvals, where large numbers of product-specific rules were previously required.
What Was It Like Before?
Previously, approval rules - especially for orderline quantity - were largely tied to individual product IDs.
For customers with large product catalogues and multiple quantity tiers, this often meant creating hundreds of rule entries. In some cases, over 700 individual entries were needed to cover all scenarios.
This made approval rules difficult to set up, time-consuming to maintain, and prone to inconsistency.
What Has Changed
Approval Requirements can now make better use of group-based matching, allowing you to apply rules across multiple products or customers at once.
Instead of defining rules product by product, you can now:
- apply approval logic to groups of products using shared attributes (tag, category, group, or attribute)
- reuse existing Advanced Rules within Approval Requirements
- reduce the number of individual rule entries significantly
This enhancement brings more structure and flexibility to approval workflows without requiring a complete redesign of how they work.
Where This Applies
These improvements are available across key approval rule types:
- Orderline Quantity → now supports broader product matching (key improvement)
- Product Rules → supports more flexible grouping using Advanced Rules
- Order Subtotal → supports customer-based matching
Existing rule types such as Product Tag, Product Group, and Category are still supported, but are now part of a more unified and flexible approach.
How to Set It Up
Go to:
Admin > Approval Requirements
When creating or editing a rule, you can now choose more flexible matching options depending on the rule type.
For example:
- In Product Rules, you can use Advanced Rule Targets to cover multiple products under one rule
- In Order Subtotal, you can use Advanced Rule Scopes to match customer groups
- First, ensure you have a Scope created under the Advanced Rules section (see tooltip)
- Then add the new Advanced Rule Scope under the Order Subtotal section in Approval Requirements
- In Orderline Quantity, you can define rules that apply to groups of products instead of selecting each product individually
- First, ensure you have a Target created under the Advanced Rules section (see tooltip)
- Then add the new Advanced Rule Target under the Orderline Quantity section in Approval Requirements
If you already have Advanced Rules configured, these can now be reused directly within your approval rules.
Tips
If your current setup includes a large number of approval entries, it’s worth reviewing them for patterns.
Where the same approval logic is repeated across multiple products, you can now group those products together and replace many individual rules with a smaller number of grouped ones.
This not only reduces setup time but also makes future updates much easier to manage.
Troubleshooting
If a rule is not triggering as expected, check that:
- the products or customers meet the conditions defined in your rule
- the correct matching option has been selected when configuring the rule
- there are no overlapping or conflicting rules affecting the same products
If you are transitioning from older rule setups, review legacy entries to ensure they are not overriding newer configurations.
Summary
This update improves Approval Requirements by allowing rules to be applied to groups of products or customers instead of individual entries.
For customers managing large catalogues or complex approval tiers, this significantly reduces admin effort and makes approval workflows easier to maintain over time.