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This guide walks you through setting up approval workflows from scratch. By the end, you’ll have a working approval system that enforces your business rules for discounts, pricing and deal terms. Approvals are configured in the dashboard under Settings → Approvals. There is no public API for creating rulesets, rules or approver groups.

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Prerequisites

Before setting up approvals, ensure you have:
  • Admin access to your Alguna organization, with permission to manage approval rulesets
  • At least one product configured
  • Team members with user accounts who can act as approvers

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Step 1: Plan Your Approval Strategy

Before creating rules, decide what should require sign-off and who signs off.

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Common Approval Scenarios

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Sketch Your Approver Hierarchy

Write down the levels you want before you build them. For example:
  • Sales Managers — discounts up to 20%
  • VP of Sales — discounts up to 35%
  • CFO — anything above 35%
Each level becomes an approver group on a rule.

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Step 2: Create a Ruleset

Rules live inside a ruleset. A ruleset groups related rules and controls whether a justification is required when it matches.
1

Open the approvals settings

Go to Settings → Approvals.
2

Create the ruleset

Click New ruleset and give it a name and an optional description.
3

Choose whether justification is required

Turn on Require justification if the requester must explain why the deal needs approval. A rule that matches unconditionally never asks for a justification, even in a ruleset that requires one.
4

Enable it

A disabled ruleset is skipped entirely during evaluation. Leave it disabled while you build the rules, then enable it when you’re ready.
Every enabled ruleset is evaluated. Within a ruleset, only the first matching rule by priority applies, so a subscription can pick up at most one rule per ruleset — but one from each ruleset.

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Step 3: Create Approval Rules

A rule pairs a condition with the approver groups that must sign off when it matches.
1

Add a rule to the ruleset

Open the ruleset and click New rule. Give it a name and description.
2

Set the condition

Choose one or more condition types and combine them with ALL or ANY. See Step 4.
3

Add approver groups

A rule needs at least one group. See Step 5.
4

Set the priority

Lower numbers are evaluated first. See Step 6.
5

Enable the rule

Disabled rules are skipped.

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Step 4: Configure Rule Conditions

Alguna supports five condition types. Operators: greater than, greater than or equal, less than, less than or equal, equal, not equal. Discount type: percentage or fixed amount. A discount condition needs a discount type — a percentage threshold and a fixed-amount threshold are different tests.

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Combining Conditions

Add several conditions to one rule and choose how they combine:
  • ALL — every condition must be true.
  • ANY — one is enough.
The “always” condition cannot be combined with others, and cannot be negated: combining it would make the other conditions either redundant or unreachable.
Because only the first matching rule in a ruleset applies, an “always” rule makes every lower-priority rule in that ruleset unreachable. Give it the highest priority number in the ruleset unless you intend it as an override.

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Step 5: Configure Approver Groups

Each rule carries one or more groups. A group defines who approves and how many of them are needed. The rule itself also has a groups strategy that decides how its groups combine: whether all groups must sign off, any one group is enough, or a minimum number of groups.

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Routing by Requester

With by requester routing, you add routing entries that map a set of requesters to a set of approvers. Use it when a rep’s own manager should approve their deals rather than a fixed committee.

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Step 6: Set Rule Priority

Within a ruleset, rules are evaluated in priority order, lowest number first, and the first match wins. Ordering therefore decides which approvers are asked, not just the order of checks. Put the most restrictive rule first: A 40% discount matches the CFO rule and stops there. If the order were reversed, the manager rule would match first and the CFO would never be asked. You can reorder rules by dragging them in the ruleset, which rewrites their priorities.

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Step 7: Configure Notifications

Approvers are notified by email when a request needs them. To also route requests into Slack:
1

Connect Slack

Go to Settings → Approvals and open the Slack settings panel.
2

Choose the workspace and channel

Approval requests are posted to the channel you select, where approvers can act on them.
3

Check the connection status

The panel shows whether the connection is enabled, disconnected, or needs reconnecting.
Alguna also emits webhooks for approval activity, so you can drive your own notifications: See Webhooks for payloads and delivery.

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Step 8: Test Your Setup

1

Build a subscription that should trip a rule

Create a draft subscription with, for example, a 25% discount on a product covered by your rule.
2

Check the approval summary

Before publishing, the subscription shows which rules matched and which groups must approve. If nothing matched, revisit the rule’s condition and whether its ruleset and rule are enabled.
3

Walk an approval through

Have an approver approve or reject from the dashboard or Slack, and confirm the flow reaches the state you expect. See Approval Flows.
4

Test a deal that should not need approval

Just as important: confirm a standard deal passes through untouched.

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Step 9: Roll Out

Start narrow and widen:
  1. Enable one ruleset covering your highest-risk case, usually deep discounts.
  2. Watch a week of real deals and check the approvals that fire are the ones you expected.
  3. Add rules for terms and product governance once the first is settled.
  4. Add an “always” ruleset only for a defined period, such as a pricing migration, and disable it afterwards.

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Troubleshooting

Check, in order: the ruleset is enabled; the rule is enabled; a higher-priority rule in the same ruleset is matching first and stopping evaluation; the condition’s discount type matches how the discount was actually applied (a percentage rule does not match a fixed-amount discount); the product on the condition is the product on the subscription.
Every enabled ruleset can contribute one rule, so several rulesets covering the same ground will stack. Consolidate related rules into a single ruleset, where first-match-wins keeps it to one.
Open the flow and check which group is outstanding. A group with the All strategy waits for every named approver. A group with no named approvers waits for any user holding the approver role, so make sure at least one user has it.
Confirm the approver has a user account and an email address on it, and that the Slack connection shows as enabled rather than needing reconnection.

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Best Practices

One ruleset per concern

Discounts in one, legal terms in another. First-match-wins keeps each concern to a single approval.

Order from strictest to loosest

The first match wins, so the executive rule has to sit above the manager rule.

Prefer groups over named individuals

Leave approvers empty to use the approver role, so the flow survives people changing jobs.

Review what fires

If a rule fires on nearly every deal, the threshold is wrong, not the deal.

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Next Steps

Approval Rules

Condition types and rule evaluation in detail.

Approval Flows

How requests progress and reach a decision.