While there is a facility to have the system automatically calculate which approvers will be involved in approvals, in some cases it may be more straight forward to simply select an approval manually from a drop-down. To cater for this, there is an option to have fully custom approvals so that whoever is submitting an item can choose who will be involved.

There is a large amount of flexibility in how the custom approvals can be setup.

Here is a breakdown of the options which can be seen in the image about:

Approval type: Drop-down: {In System, DocuSign}
Note: The DocuSign option requires DocuSign integration option to have been purchased with the system.
This settings allows you to select an approval to happen in DocuSign or in the system. A submission can have a mixture of In system and Docusign approvals. Refer to the 'Integration: DocuSign' page to read about how the DocuSign approval works.

User type: Drop-down: {System User, Contact, External}
Approvals don't have to be limited to system users. By using this 'user type' selection you can manually select approvers from a central contact list in the system, or for complete flexibility, you can select an 'external' user type which will mean anyone can participate in the approval by simply specifying an email address.
If hosting Nimblex on an internal network, access for external users to conduct approvals may be subject to your organisations network security rules
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Role: Free text
Specify what position the approver is in - in relation to this submission. This is primarily used for auditing.

Approver: Free text / Drop-down {System Users, Contacts}
If an external user is selected then free text is used to put in the name of the approver.
If a contact is selected, this will be from the drop-down of contacts detected in the system.
If a system user is selected, this will be from the drop-down of all the organisation's system users.

Email address: Free text
This is the email address associated with the approval. An approval request is sent to the individual's email address so it's important that this email address is correct. If user type is System User or Contact then this field will be locked as the system will be autopopulating from the users' details / contact details.

Batch: Number
The Batch represents the sequence of approvals. While approvals will always be sent out from the approver list, top down, there is potential to have multiple approvals sent in parallel. In the image below, the batch numbers have been manipulated in such a way that approvers #1, #2 and #3 will be sent to approve all at the same time, and from those three, any of those individuals can approve in any order.

You could even specify an approval where all approvals are done in a single batch, meaning all users will be sent approval requests at the same time and can respond in any order.

The only limitation with batching approvals is that DocuSign approvals must be done in sequence - one by one - meaning those approvals cannot be conducted in parallel at this time.