Due dates for approvals

Marketing Operations determines individual due dates for approvers to complete their reviews. Due dates for approvals depend on whether the approver is required or optional and the approver's place in the sequence.

Approval due dates are determined differently for required reviewers than they are for optional reviewers.

For optional reviewers, the due date is the date that the approval was submitted plus the duration that is specified for the reviewer. The place in the sequence does affect the due date for optional reviewers.

Due dates for required approvers do not reserve time for optional reviewers to respond.Marketing Operations calculates due dates for required approvers as follows:

  Approval submission date 
+ sum of previous required approvers' durations 
+ duration for this required appprover
= current approver's due date

For example:

Three approvers are required

Each one approves in sequence

The duration for each approver is one day

In this case, the due date for the third approver is three days after the approval was submitted.

The durations for approvers that work in parallel (that is, they have the same sequence number in the process) is calculated as follows.

The duration is counted one time; it is not summed.

If the durations have different lengths, the longest duration is used.

When Marketing Operations calculates dates, the system-wide setting for non-work time is considered. Depending on the value of this setting, weekend or other non-business days can also be included in the calculation. Marketing Operations also accounts for each user's timezone.

Approval due date calculation example

For example, consider an approval process that is configured as follows.

Approval submission date: 25 August 2008 03:00 PM

Target due date: 30 August 2008 05:00 PM

Four approvers:

Sequences and durations for example
Approver	Sequence	Duration	Required?
A	1	01D-00H-00M	yes
B	2	01D-00H-00M	yes
C	2	01D-00H-00M	yes
D	3	01D-00H-00M	yes

The due dates for the approvers are as follows:

Approver A: 26 August 2008 03:00 PM

Approver B: 27 August 2008 03:00 PM

Approver C: 27 August 2008 03:00 PM

Approver D: 28 August 2008 03:00 PM

Different approver durations example

Marketing Operations can give different approvers different amounts of time to complete their review. For example, change the duration of time that is given to Approver C in the previous example to two days.

Sequences and durations for example 2
Approver	Sequence	Duration	Required?
A	1	01D-00H-00M	yes
B	2	01D-00H-00M	yes
C	2	02D-00H-00M	yes
D	3	01D-00H-00M	yes

If the duration for Approver C is two days, then the due date is 28 August; the due date for Approver D is 29 August. There are now three days between Approvers A and D.

Approver A: 26 August 2008 03:00 PM

Approver B: 27 August 2008 03:00 PM

Approver C: 28 August 2008 03:00 PM

Approver D: 29 August 2008 03:00 PM