Salesforce Milestone Not Reached On Approval Process Action

Question

In Salesforce, my Milestone is reached when I manually update the field to meet the Milestone criteria. However, when the Milestone criteria is satisfied via an Approval Process Action, the Milestone is not reached. Please help!

Answer 1

When an approval process finishes, the actions defined in the "Final Approval Actions" section are fired. It sounds like you have a field update action defined here, and that, by updating this field, you are expecting your milestone criteria to be satisfied, correct?

Unfortunately, actions originating from the final approval step in an approval process do not further trigger other actions. For example, if you were to have an email alert go out when a checkbox is checked, the email won't go out if the checkbox is checked by finishing an approval process.

The only way around this, that I've found, is to have the actions of your approval process trigger an asynchronous method which, in turn, updates the field connected to your milestone. Separating the processes from the approval process itself, by having it call an @future method, ensures regular workflow rules are followed.