Entry criteria are conditions that you can add to a step, which must be met before the step will be assigned.

Sometimes you only want to assign steps in a business process under specific circumstances. For example, your business process assigns a step to your company's compliance officer when it is submitted. However, you want to also assign a step to the regional manager if the business process changes to the financial profile of a Tier A client.

Entry criteria define conditions that determine whether to assign a step when a business process is submitted. Rules are conditional statements that are evaluated by comparing a specified value to a field from the contact, KYC, company, opportunity, or service request record, or business process form.

You can add entry criteria to each individual step in a business process template. When the business process is submitted, entry criteria for the first step are evaluated. If the conditions in the entry criteria are met, the step is assigned to the user or group of users specified in the step. If the conditions are not met, the step is skipped and entry criteria for the next step in the business process are evaluated.

Examples of entry criteria for steps

The following examples demonstrate how entry criteria can be used in steps.

Using contact or KYC fields in entry criteria

In a business process template, you can create a step that is assigned to a specified user only when a client's annual income exceeds $100,000. You create the step, then add a rule in the Entry Criteria subtab with the following parameters:

1. In the Field field, click the Select button, then select Contact > Annual Income.
2. In the Condition field, select greater than.
3. In the Value field, enter 100000.

When the business process is submitted, the task for this step is assigned to the reviewer only if the annual income in the client's profile is greater than $100,000.

Using form fields in entry criteria

In some cases, such as when you are using a business process to fill in a new contact's profile, you cannot use the above rule because an annual income has not yet been recorded.

However, in the form for your business process template, you can create a question in which the user fills out their client's annual income when they run the business process. You can then configure the step to also evaluate the annual income question from the form to determine if it exceeds $100,000.

To do this, you need to add two more rules to the step. You first add a rule to check if the annual income was filled out in the form:

1. In the Field field, click the Select button, then select Flow > Page_1 > annualIncome.
2. In the Condition field, select specified.
3. In the field on the right side of the preceding question, select OR.

Then you add a rule to check if the value entered for the annual income is greater than $100,000:

1. In the Field field, click the Select button, then select Flow > Page_1 > annualIncome.
2. In the Condition field, select greater than.
3. In the Value field, enter 100000.
4. In the field on the right side of the preceding rule, select AND.

When the business process is submitted, entry criteria is evaluated using the annual income from both the contact record and the submitted form. If either of the values are greater than $100,000, the task for this step is assigned to the user specified in the step.