How to make documents flow between queues?

When setting up a business process or workflow, you often want documents to move from one queue to another as users deal with them and resolve cases.

Typically, lifecycle states and queue filters are used to achieve this behavior.

Let's see it with an example. For invoices, the following lifecycle is configured.

In the example, it is needed that users from Accounting see in their Dashboard queues, the invoices that have entered new (Registered state) and that once they review these invoices, they move to the approval of the manager of a business area.

Basically, we want that from the queue "New Invoices" where incoming invoices are received, they can be sent to the queue "Business Area Revision" where they can be approved by the department managers.

We will focus on the first 3 states of the life cycle for this example:

Let's review now the configuration of the queues.

New Invoices queue

The New Invoices queue filters the documents that use the "Invoices" form and that are in the "Invoices" space.

In addition, the queue only shows those documents where the current lifecycle status is "Registered".

A document like this one would be shown in the queue.

Let's see the Business Area Revision queue.

Business Area Revision queue

This queue has a similar filter to the previous one, but in this case, it will only list the documents in the Assigned state.

If you would like to move the Easy Expresso invoice to this queue, you would simply have to update its state. You would have to change its lifecycle state, first to Reviewed and then to Assigned.

But this queue has an extra element in its filter. In order for each area manager to see only the invoices for their area, we use a field in the form and a field filter in the queue.

The filter by the expression myself in the "In charge of approval" field, makes that a user can see in a queue, only the documents in which his user name appears as a value in that specific field.

This last filter is not necessary to get the invoice to move between the two queues, but it is certainly a useful filter that might be handy in similar scenarios ;)