Employee Travel Authorization System

[StephenLei]

Hello Community,

I am trying to build a system where by employee travel requests can be automated as followed:

Submit the form > Send email notification to the line manager > if Approved send another form to the employee for traveling details{Else send a rejection email to the employee}> Employee fill in the new form > and submitted to a third party travel agency > Agency sends back quotation to the employee and the finance team > Finance team send approval to the employee and HR

I would like to hear your approach on how to built such system with appSheet.

Thank you!

[graham_howe]

My first approach for such a system would actually be to see what off the shelf, either commercial or open source, solutions might exist already. This has the potential to turn into quite a complex requirement depending on the volume of requests, the security requirements, potential linking to third party systems etc. I would also have a good look through the App templates there is not one I can see specifically for booking travel but there are very likely components from various apps which could be reused.

If I were convinced that the potential scale, functionality and user base was appropriate for AppSheet development, then I would start with the data model. Define tables for employee, request, travel_agency, quotation as a start, perhaps also some reference tables for airports, airlines, hotels etc.

Once I had some of the data model designed, including references between tables, and most importantly a good set of sample data in each table, then I would send it to AppSheet and start building the functionality. There is a lot of emailing going on in your design, that's not a problem, but if you know that every user of the app is using GMail, then it opens up some nice possibilities with sending dynamic email from a bot. 

Do be aware though of who is going to use the app, whether it is only employees of one company or other partners too. Be aware of APIs, web services or other integrations you may require. Think about whether OCR or similar is required to process the quotation from the travel agency. All of these things could have significant impact on the licencing and therefore cost of the application.