So Easy to Set Multiple Approvers in Salesforce... or is it?

Salesforce approval process is an automated process that automates how your organization approves Salesforce records. The approval process is a combination of steps for a record to be approved / rejected by either a user, a queue, or a public group. The approval process also defines the actions to take when a record is approved, rejected, recalled, or first submitted for approval. If you want to know more about approval process, checkout this project in Trailhead.

Salesforce standard approval process has a feature where you can select more than one approver to approve a record at the same time, based on whoever approve it first. For example (image below), there are two approving members who can approve based on the first respond. Everything looks good, right? Well… Not quite!

My business case

Imagine if you have up to five preliminary approvers needed before the next escalation to the C level approval. I have 5 lookup fields, let's call them Accounting Approver, Business Approver, FP&A Approver, Legal Approver & Tax Approver. These approvers depend on the record. Some may need just one approver, another could be three or four, or maybe all five approvers needed. This become a problem to use multiple approver: This process requires all approving members need to be filled. What if one particular record only require 2, 3 or 4 approvers? When I asked Mr. Google, there's one suggestion to create automation and fill the empty approver to an 'Auto-approver User'.

Cosmetically, it is not appealing.

Or, maybe I should have a different approval steps to trigger each approval combination? That mean I need to have 27,216 of different step combinations! Clearly, this is not scalable.

My solution

I reassign the approvers in numbered position: Approver 1, Approver 2, Approver 3, Approver 4 & Approver 5. For example, if it was only one approver, the user will be reassigned to Approver 1. If there were two approvers, assign to Approver 1 & Approver 2, and so on. The reassignment of the approver made the Approver 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 are more dynamic.

From this:

To this

Record-triggered flow (fast update) is used to assign the user from the designated fields to the numbered position. It also assigns the approver category so that we know, who are these approvers are.

Now I have assigned the approver dynamically, I need to create the approval process. There are five different approval process. Well, at least 5 is better than 27,216 steps!

My approval process is good to go! What a nice way to end my week!