Due dates for approvals

Approval due dates are determined differently for required reviewers than they are for optional reviewers. For optional reviewers, the due date is the date the approval was submitted plus the duration specified for the reviewer, regardless of the reviewer's sequence in the process.

Due dates for required approvers do not include durations for optional revieweres and are calculated as follows:

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

For example, if there are three required approvers, each approves in sequence, and the duration for each is one day, then the due date for the third approver is three days after the approval was submitted.

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

The duration is counted once; it is not summed.

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

For example, consider an approval process configured as follows.

Approval submission date: 25 August 2008 03:00 PM

Target due date: 30 August, 2008 05:00 PM

Four approvers:

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 would be.

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

Now, if the duration for Approver C was two days, then the due date for C would be 28 August and the due date for D would be 29 August. That is, there would be two days between Approvers A and D, not three.

While calculating dates, the system-wide setting for non-work time is considered. Depending on the value of this setting, weekend and/or other non-business days could be included in the calculation.