Newly added approver unable to see old pending PRs for approval

[SAPSupport]

A newly added approver in the approval group Category Manager - IT Software cannot see previous pending PRs for approval in their To-do list. 

I want to confirm the expected behavior below.

1. If the approval flow of the PR is already Active for approval of Category Manager - IT Software, then the newly added users in this group will not be able to see it in their To-do list.
2. Suppose the approval flow is pending approval of other approvers before the approval of the said group. In that case, the newly added user can see the PRs in their To-do list once the approval flow is Active for approval of the said group.
3. Or may we know the standard behavior of the system for those newly added users in the group?

We also want to know how to trigger those PRs that are not in included in their To-do list, however, when they checked the PR manually they can able to see the Approve button into it.

Thank you.

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[SAPSupport · Accepted solution]

Dear Customer, 

My name is Lisa from the MM-PUR team. Let me explain how the workflow approver determination works:

When the workflow(traditional or flexible workflow) is triggered, the system will determine the approvers. In your case they are determined based on the category IT Software. These approvers are set and assigned in the workflow log. There is no job that runs in the background to check if these have been changed/updated. They are determined at the time of workflow triggering initially and not again unless the actual document for example Purchase Order is updated and workflow is reset/retriggered. 

So, if a new approver is added in the workflow settings(category settings) and a document is already in Awaiting Approval status, the new approver will not see these documents in their Approval list. This is standard behaviour. The workflow has already been triggered and the original approver is determined. The only way to ensure the new approver now see's these documents is to forward the pending approval documents to the new approver. 

For any document that has not yet triggered the workflow, these will go to the new approver as the workflow has not yet ran and when it does the new approver will be determined as expected. 

I hope that helps answer your query. 

Kind regards,
Lisa
SAP Support