Streamline Your Workflow with Our on Approval Bill Format for Teams

On approval bill format for teams

today we're going to talk about how to use the microsoft teams approvals app and specifically focus on creating and managing templates now i've talked about approvals before and it is a great way to keep track of all the things that need your approval whether it be a vacation request or a document request if you scroll down to the bottom of the navigation pane and click create or manage templates you will find the various template options the first thing i'd like to point out is when you go to the drop down in the upper left hand corner you may see different options for where you can create your templates because i'm an admin of this site i can create an organization-wide template most people will only have the option to create templates associated with teams that they are an owner of since the most common scenario is to be able to create templates for a team we're going to focus on creating a template for my testing team one of the major benefits of using templates is it will standardize how people will submit information to you for approval you have two choices you can create a new template from scratch or pick one of the popular templates let's look at one of the popular templates first and build a leave request a floating dialog box is going to appear and you can see a preview of all of the fields that are already included with this template including some leave type categories don't worry if these aren't exactly right for your organization we can customize this template as we move along then you may see the option to choose who can see the template admins can choose org-wide or specific people but again most of us are just going to see team wide i selected my testing team earlier but on this page i can choose to switch the template to another team if i want in this case i'm happy with my choice so i'll just click done now we are on the template management page and we will work through the basic settings form design and workflow settings so first under basic settings let's give the template a new name and call it training team leave request the template already has a category and description but you can change it if you like to one of these other options now we're going to click next and go to the form design page where we can see the questions that already exist and then we can add additional questions or modify the ones that are already there if you're happy with the template you can just click next and move on but for example under this leave type there are some categories already here and maybe they don't all apply to my organization the option that i find more useful is to add additional questions to the template so for example where i work we need to know who to contact when you are out of the office now that the question has been added you will have the choice of whether or not this question should be required in this case we're going to say yes this is a required question with the optional question added we can go and click next in the upper right hand corner on the workflow settings page you can choose whether or not to require a file attachment and choose whether or not the requester gets to enter the name of the approver in my example i want to specify the approver and because i work for a small team all leave requests go through the one manager and the last option you have is whether or not to change the responses you can leave it as approve or reject or click custom responses and type in anything that makes sense to you when you're happy with the template click on preview and then a floating dialog box will appear and this is what the template will look like to those who are going to fill it out this looks pretty good so i'm going to go ahead and publish our newly created template now we are at the template management screen where you can see the training team leave request if you need to make any changes to this template or disable it you can scroll to the right hand side and click the three dots to see those options if you don't want to use one of the templates that's provided in the microsoft store you can click on new template in the upper right hand corner and then select create from scratch we're going to stick with the example of using a team wide template i'm going to also leave that template in my testing team and select done we're right back at the template management page where we have our basic settings form design and workflow settings you may notice that this is exactly like we saw before except instead of having things pre-filled out we need to type in our information so i'm going to say this is a video approval and it's part of the administration category now i'm going to click next which will take us to form design click add new and then you can start adding all of the questions that are relative to your specific template this really works like any other form so i've quickly added the information to the form that will be required in this case i want a title a topic and a link to the video now i'm going to click next and choose my workflow settings for this example i'm going to let the person submitting the video choose who the approver is going to be click on preview and verify that the form has all of the information you need and then all you have to do is click publish and now you can see i have two templates on the template management page for my testing team i've closed out of the templates interface and i'm back in the main approvals app if we go to the upper right hand corner and click on new approval request you will see the option to enter a new request or use a template i'm going to click on template and for this example choose the video approval your team members will fill out this form just like they would any other approval now that you know how to use approval templates in microsoft teams go play with it and see how it works for you and your workflow thank you for watching this video and i'll see you in the next one