Workflow rules and the approval processes

The workflow rules and approval process features within the Salesforce CRM application allow you to automate and streamline the key business processes for your organization.

Workflow rules can be used to capture key business processes and events to generate automated actions. They allow you to configure various types of actions to be fired based on the field or fields of the record that meet predefined conditions. In essence, a workflow rule sets workflow actions into motion when its predefined conditions are met. You can configure workflow actions to execute immediately whenever a record meets the conditions specified in the workflow rule, or you can set time-dependent features that execute the workflow actions on a specific day.

Approval processes are a structured set of steps used to facilitate formal sign-off on data records. They can range from simple, single steps to complex, sophisticated routing to provide automated processing that your organization...