Consultant groups — how they work

What a consultant group is

A consultant group is a standard approval group with the Consultant group flag turned on. This flag changes who can approve at that step: only external consultants (for example, your bookkeeping team) — not the client’s own users — can act on documents that reach this group.

Who sees the document

When a document reaches a consultant group, every consultant assigned to that client sees it in their overview. The group’s member list is not a fixed named list — it is resolved dynamically from all consultants linked to the client.

Typical positions in a flow

Consultant groups most often appear at the beginning of a flow (for coding and dimension entry) or at the end (for a final delivery or posting confirmation step). Normal groups for client-side approvers sit in between.

Pairing with forbid-external rules

By default, consultants can approve in any group — consultant-flagged or not. To restrict them so they only act on the steps explicitly assigned to them, enable Forbid external rules for approval in the global approval settings. Without this setting, the consultant group flag alone does not prevent consultants from acting elsewhere in the flow.

When not to use consultant groups

If you want consultants to act flexibly across the whole flow — for example to cover for absent client approvers — leave the consultant group flag off and add consultants as named members of normal groups.