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I thought what I needed to do could be accomplished by Approvals by Zapier, but that was discontinued back in February.  I came across an incomplete tutorial in this community outlining how to pre-fill a form via URL.  

Here’s what I’m trying to do:

I have vendors submitting Invoices but they need to be approved. I want to have a form (Invoice Form) that, when submitted, triggers a zap which generates an email to an approver.  That email would contain a URL to an approval form (which is associated with the table in the Invoice Form), which has, prefilled, the data from the Invoice Form submittal, along with a checkbox to approve.  When the Submit on this form is clicked, a zap is triggered which updates the table behind the original Invoice Form with this approval checkbox = checked, and continues along with other actions.

I see tutorials on creating a Button field in a table, but I don’t see how submitting a form can be associated with that button.  It seems that button can only be clicked when a Table is part of an Interface.  So I don’t think this method replaces the Approvals by Zapier.

Is this even possible?  Perhaps there’s another way to do it?

Why did Zapier discontinue Approvals?

Hi @Special Needs Respite, welcome to the Community!

I can’t speak as to why Approvals by Zapier was removed. The alternative is indeed that Button field you mentioned, but it’s not available to use within a Zap. Currently it’s only available to be added within a Zapier Table.

The invoice form itself doesn’t need to be created using Zapier Interfaces necessarily. If the invoice form uses another form app like Google Forms for example, you’d make a Zap that uses a New Form Response trigger and use a Create Record (Zapier Tables) action. This would mean that when the form is submitted, the Zap adds the form data into the table. Then in that table, for each form submission record you’d have a button to approve the invoice request which can be set up to either continue an existing Zap or trigger a new one. 

We have a tutorial on how to approve records in Zapier Tables which explains things in more detail: How to create an approvals table with Zapier Tables.

Hope that helps. If you have any further questions on this or get stuck at all in setting it up let us know - happy to help further! 

Thanks for the response - it's encouraging to know there's a community like this! 

The thing is - how does the approver access that button? It seems they would need to have access to the entire table and a Zapier account. I can't do this as each invoice set up will have a different approver. I've tried displaying the table in an interface - but that button isn't active for interfaces. 

 

You are most welcome @Special Needs Respite! 🤗

It should be possible to add a button to the table that the approver can access, by setting the Field Type to Button when adding a new field:
2d6bcf2c1c1f9cb92b1ede24c2f3e59a.png
You can find out more about how to use Button fields here: Use button fields in Zapier Tables


And with Zapier Tables you can set up different views for different people. I’m not sure how you would determine which invoice should be approved by which approver but perhaps there’s a field on the form that you could use when setting up the view to determine this? Then you’d hYou can find out more about how to set up views here: Create views in Zapier Tables

Hope that helps to get you started. Keen to ensure you’re all set here so please do keep us updated on how you get on with this!

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