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Approve documents using the Continia Web Approval Portal

  • 9 min.

If you prefer a stand-alone approval client, you can approve documents in the Continia Web Approval Portal – Continia's proprietary browser-based approval platform – instead of doing it in Business Central. One of the benefits of using the Web Approval Portal is that access is restricted to approvals only, meaning that ordinary users can’t navigate to vendor cards, payment information, bank accounts, etc. The Web Approval Portal also comes with a smartphone- and tablet-friendly interface, which is the recommended choice if you intend to approve documents using mobile devices.

Before you can use the Web Approval Portal, you must set it up in the Microsoft Azure admin environment. To do this, see this guide (only available to Continia partners).

When you've set up the Web Approval Portal in Azure, go to the Continia User Setup, and set Approval Client to Continia Web Approval Portal for the users you want to grant access to the portal.

Continia user setup card continia web approval client

Go back to the Continia User Setup, and select Export Users. All new users will automatically receive a welcome email with a link to the Web Approval Portal sign-in page. The link in the email varies, depending on whether the portal connects to a production or a sandbox tenant.

Important

In order for Document Capture to be able to send emails to users, you must either set up a default email account (see the Microsoft guide Set Up Email) or assign the Document Capture Approval Status Email scenario to an email account. To do the latter, navigate to the Email Accounts page, and then select the relevant account > Navigate > Email Scenarios > Assign scenarios > Document Capture Approval Status Email > OK.

When you open the sign-in page, select Sign-In with Microsoft 365, and enter your username and password.

Continia Online sign in page

The start page shows a list of all open approvals for the user who's currently signed in.

My open approvals

You can select one of the records to get a detailed view of it:

Document card Continia Web Approval

Both from the list of open approvals and from the detailed view, you can approve, reject, forward, put on hold, make comments, etc., simply by selecting the actions at the top of the page.

The Web Approval Portal has two main menus:

  • Approvals
  • Archive

Approvals displays a list of all open approvals and is the default landing page when you sign in to the Web Approval Portal, whereas Archive allows you to search for historical approvals. To switch from Approvals to Archive, select Purchase > Archive on the ribbon at the top of the page.

Main menus in Continia Web Approval Portal

From here, you can search for documents by filtering on document type, vendor, posting date interval, internal invoice number, and/or vendor invoice number.

Archive Continia Web Approval Portal

In the next unit, you'll learn how to set up approval sharing.

Video

Watch this video to learn more about the Web Approval Portal.