An approval process in Salesforce CRM is an automated mechanism that you can set up to process the approval of records within your organization.

Working with approval processes involves the creation of a structured set of steps to enable the signoff of specified records that must be approved along with specifying which users must be set to approve it at each of the steps. Here, each step can apply to all the records within the process or specified records that have certain field values. The building of the approval processes also requires the setting up of the required actions to be taken after the record is either first submitted, approved, rejected, or recalled for approval.

Approval processes are similar to workflow rules in the sense that they can invoke the same key actions. However, there are significant differences between workflow rules and approval processes, such as: