Workflow and approval process logic

I am in the process of building out a contract workflow/approval process and looking for a best practice method....

Here is the scenario

• Different levels of LOA based on contract value and terms
• This will drive who is required to provide approval on the contract review

Currently I have check boxes set up as being "some person" Required for each person

I have a status of approval setup for each person. I am going to right form rules based on contract conditions to check those boxes and show the approvers

What I think I am really looking for is a formula to do two things on the staus

• First is to capture when the selected approved has changed the status of their review
• And couple this with whether or not they are required

What I have so far for each approver is this

If([Department or Person Completed],
"<div style=\"background-color:green;width:50\">Approved</div>",
"<div style=\"background-color:pink;width:50\">Pending</div>")

I believe I want to stack a Case and an IF to look at the requirement and say if required checkbox is no set the status to show Not Required (yellow) and if required show the formula above..

The whole workflow logic should be able to be built out with form rules, just hate spending hours testing formulas until they work