Approvals
What an approval is
An approval is a process step where a person makes a decision: Approve or Reject. The decision and the comment are stored in the process and drive the diagram's branches.
What sets it apart from a plain task is the outcome. A task is completed with a single action and passes no choice back to the process.
How to approve
- Open the approval — from the notification, from My Work, or from the Processes panel on the record page.
- Check Details — the approval form and the record data as it was when the approval was created.
- Fill in the form fields, if there are any.
- Press Approve or Reject.
- Add a comment if needed — it stays visible to the following steps.
The process continues as soon as you confirm.
Approval types
An approval type defines the form: which fields the approver sees and fills in. Types are configured under Business Processes → Approval Types, and the node picks the one it needs.
Form fields can be filled in two ways:
- by the approver — an ordinary form;
- from the record or from process variables — the node maps a form field onto a record field. The value is captured when the approval is created and does not change afterwards, even if the record is edited.
With no approval type set, the "Details" button is not shown — the decision is made without a form.
Values are captured at creation
Both the filled form and the record context are snapshotted when the approval is created. The approver sees the data the decision is being asked about, not the record's current state.
If the list of values in a record field changed after the approval was created, the node panel in the editor flags the divergence — the mapping is worth rechecking.
Several approvers
One step can be assigned to several people with a quorum rule:
| Quorum | The outcome is decided when |
|---|---|
| All | everyone has answered; a single rejection rejects immediately |
| Majority | more than half are in favour (or a majority became unreachable) |
| N votes | N votes in favour are collected (or N became unreachable) |
| First | the first person answers |
As soon as the quorum is reached the remaining approvals are cancelled, and the process receives the final decision along with the vote counters — both usable in branch conditions.
What happens after the decision
An approval node has two outgoing branches — Approved and Rejected. What each one does is up to the diagram: change the state, send a notification, send the record back for rework, launch a subprocess.
If only one branch is drawn, the other outcome has nowhere to go — the editor warns about that before saving.
Finding out the result
- The record's author gets a notification if the diagram has that step.
- The decision and the comment are visible in the Processes panel on the record page.
- Finished approvals stay under the Done tab in My Work.
If it was rejected
- Open the record and read the approver's comment.
- Correct the data.
- Start the process again — manually from the record page, or by changing the field the start is subscribed to.