question Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group in Developer forum

Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group

Jacob23 — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 15:59:16 GMT

Hi,

I have an issue that seems to be out of the box. My company's change process requests multiple approval groups at upond CR submission. These groups may contain the same person in multiple groups for one CR.

The issue that happens is that if ServiceNow sees that you are an approver in more than one group it will see your approval as ONE overall approval, rather than two individual approval sets.

See the below screenshots where you can see I created two approval groups under one approval action in a flow. I also added in Help Desk group.

System administrator is in the test groups and user 1 is in helpdesk

You can see the 3 approval groups added:

Then in the approvers section you only see one approval for the system administrator who is the only person in both test groups.

If I got directly to the sysapproval_group table I can see all 3 approval groups.

However, when I approve the 1 approval for system administrator, it will also approve the other test group pending approval.

With my process at my company the approval groups indicate a seperate part of the process that has been completed, so all approval groups have to be isolated.

We did have a custom action created for this, but due to the upgrade from Tokyo this broke in our Dev environment. I am trying to fix this now but it is a massive script, so I am wondering if someone has come across this and has an easy fix.

Re: Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group

Mike_R — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 17:56:41 GMT

Since this appears to be upgrade/Tokyo related, it's recommended that you open a case with SN support.

Re: Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group

Jacob23 — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 19:25:16 GMT

I did open a case with them, sadly if you have anything custom it is out of scope of their normal support.

Re: Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group

Mike_R — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 20:42:00 GMT

I do not have this issue in my PDI.

Each group approval is treated as a separate approval. See example

Since you mentioned you had the issue with Change, have you looked into using Change Approval policies rather than configuring the approvals in the flow?

instanceName.service-now.com/chg_policy_approval_list.do?sysparm_query=active%3Dtrue&sysparm_view=

https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/tokyo-it-service-management/page/product/change-management/concept/change-approval-policy.html

Re: Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group

Jacob23 — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 17:56:48 GMT

This looks interesting. I will give it a read and see if it is a good replacement. My manager was able to resolve the issue with our custom action. For some reason any action that handles a array but its value is empty it breaks in the tokyo release. Somehow, in previous releases servicenow was able to handle null arrays and continue with the rest of the workflow.

Re: Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group

Community Alums — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:14:20 GMT

HI @Jacob23 Did you end up solving this. This same thing also happens for me even with the new Change Approval Policies

Re: Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group

Nikhil65 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 07:11:13 GMT

@Jacob23 Even I faced the same issue when trying to add approvals to the non-task table.
Were you able to figure out a solution for this?

Re: Approvals are combining if approver is in more than one approval group

Nikhil65 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:47:05 GMT

So, after too many RND into OOB SN code and searches came across the below article.
As per SNOW, if we use ask for approval action for generating approvals this is expected behavior.
As in, if a user is part of multiple groups(approval groups) that were added to the record, only 1 sysapproval_approver record would get created for that user wrt that record.