How is business process automation different from workflow automation?
Workflow automation is the engine. Business process automation is one of its most common applications: multi-step processes that cross team boundaries, require human approvals, and need audit trails that an external reviewer can defend. In Strkr, both live in the same visual canvas with the same block library. BPA just leans harder on approval blocks, deadline escalations, delegation, and the audit log than a simple trigger-and-fire workflow does. A lead-routing rule that fires on a form fill is workflow. A three-tier discount approval chain with SLAs, escalations, delegation during PTO, and a SOC 2 audit trail is BPA. The lines blur in practice, which is why both run on the same primitives.
Can non-technical users build approval chains in Strkr?
Yes. The approval block is a drag-and-drop block on the canvas. The sales ops lead picks the approver role from a dropdown, sets the SLA in hours or business days, chooses what happens on approve and reject using visual branch outputs, and publishes. No code, no DSL, no scripting language to learn, no YAML to edit by hand. The three-tier discount approval chain described on this page is a 20-minute build for someone who has used the canvas before. The limiting factor is almost always policy clarity, not the tool. If the finance team cannot name the thresholds, the chain is not ready to build regardless of which platform you pick.
How does Strkr handle approvers who are out of office?
Delegation. Every user has a delegation list on their profile with an optional start and end date. When an approver is marked out of office, pending approvals route to the first delegate on their list for that window. The delegation is logged on the audit trail so there is no ambiguity about who actually said yes at year-end, and the delegate sees the full request context the primary approver would have seen. SLAs continue to run against the original approver so delegation does not extend the clock. When the approver returns, approvals route back to them automatically without any manual flip.
Does Strkr BPA integrate with legal review tools like Ironclad or DocuSign CLM?
Yes. Approval blocks can fire outbound webhooks to any contract lifecycle management tool, pause until a signed response comes back on the inbound HTTP endpoint, and resume on the signal with the signed artifact attached to the deal. In practice, most revenue teams running standard contracts through Strkr do not need a separate CLM for day-to-day flow. Legal review on non-standard contracts is where the integration matters, and the handoff is a two-block addition to the existing process: send to legal review, wait for signal, continue. The integration pattern is the same for any CLM that exposes a webhook callback.
How does the audit trail hold up for SOC 2 and SOX reviews?
The audit log captures every approval request, every approver action, every policy version in effect at the moment of the decision, every delegation, and every escalation with timestamps, user identity, device, and channel. Exports to CSV for auditor delivery or stays queryable in the report builder with saved views the controller can sign off on in advance. The log is immutable in the sense that approval records cannot be edited after the fact, only superseded by new records. Teams running SOC 2 Type II and SOX 404 reviews have passed on this evidence without supplementary artifacts, and auditors have accepted the version-pinned policy reference as evidence of consistent control execution.
What happens if an approval request sits past its SLA?
Auto-escalation. Every approval request has an SLA set when the block was configured, typically 24, 48, or 72 business hours depending on the policy. When the SLA breaches, the request routes to the approver's manager by default, or to any user or role you specify in the escalation configuration, with the full context and a note explaining this is an escalation and why. SLAs continue running against the escalation tier so nothing stalls indefinitely waiting on a second person who may also be out. The escalation chain is on the audit trail with its own timestamps so the full response time is visible at year-end.
Is Strkr BPA an alternative to Nintex, ProcessMaker, or Pega?
For revenue team processes, yes. For enterprise-wide process orchestration spanning procurement, finance, HR, and operations across a company of 10,000 employees with regulated workflow documentation requirements, no. Strkr is purpose-built for revenue BPA: deal approvals, discount chains, contract routing, customer onboarding, renewal motions, cross-team handoffs, partner co-sell handoffs. Teams that have left Nintex, ProcessMaker, Pega, or K2 for revenue-side processes usually cite build velocity, CRM depth, licensing math, and the ability for RevOps to own the policy end-to-end as the reasons. The reverse pattern is rare, which is a useful signal about where each tool genuinely fits.
Can Strkr BPA handle parallel approvals when two reviews can happen at once?
Yes. Parallel sub-approvals are a configuration option on the approval chain. For a deal that needs both legal and finance signoff where neither depends on the other, the process fires both requests simultaneously and continues to the next step only when both come back approved. One rejection halts the chain and routes to a reconsider branch. Parallel configuration is useful for compressing cycle time on cross-functional approvals where sequential routing would double the elapsed time without changing any decisions. The audit trail captures both decisions separately with full context on who approved what and when.