Help Center

When Are Approvals Needed?

Approvals (also called Compliance Approvals) are an optional safeguard that requires a designated team member to sign off before a run moves forward. Unlike a single all-or-nothing switch, approval can be required at any combination of three steps — Import Data, Generate PDFs, or Send Emails — so this is useful for organizations where:

• A supervisor must verify donor data right after import, before any PDFs are created.
• Someone should sanity-check the generated receipts before they go out.
• Regulatory or internal policy requires sign-off on tax documents before email delivery.
• Multiple team members prepare runs but only certain people can authorize the next step.

Approvals are off by default for a run. An admin, owner, or the run’s creator turns them on and decides which of the three steps are gated. See Approval Settings for setup instructions.

The Approval Workflow

1. A gated step completes

There’s no separate “submit” action — as soon as a gated step finishes (the import is validated, the PDFs are generated, or the run is about to email donors), the app automatically creates an approval request for that step and blocks it from proceeding. The run’s workflow status bar shows the step as awaiting approval and links straight to it.

2. Review

Every designated approver for that step gets a notification email with a link to review it. They can respond two ways:

• From the emailed link — the link works only for the approver it was sent to. An approver who isn’t signed in signs in first and is then taken to the approval in the app. Approvers must be active members of the run’s organization, so every approver has an account.
• In-app — under Approvals, which lists requests still waiting on a response, a history of resolved ones, and (on the Dashboard) a widget summarizing what’s awaiting the current user.

Either way, the reviewer sees a preview scoped to the step being approved — imported rows with any edited fields highlighted, the generated receipt list, or the outgoing email recipient list — searchable and paginated for large runs, plus the total record count and dollar amount.

For Send Emails, the approval page also shows the email itself: who it is from, the template and its language, and whether it is a first send or a resend. Step through the recipients with the arrows to read each donor’s subject and message as that donor will receive it, in their language, and open every attachment: the donor’s receipt PDF and any files the template attaches. In a test run, the page shows that every email goes to the person who started the send instead of the donor.

For Generate PDFs, the first receipt’s PDF is shown on the page and every receipt in the list has Open PDF. A PDF removed by the retention period reads Expired.

The email and PDFs stay viewable after the request is decided, as a record of what was approved. The template is read when the emails are sent, so a change to the template after the request is made also changes what goes out.

3. Approve or Reject

Either response can carry a comment. The Comments field is optional, but a comment on a rejection tells the run’s owner what needs to change.

• Approve — once the requirement is met (see Approval Settings for how “met” is defined), the step unblocks. What happens next depends on the step:
  • Send Emails — sending starts on its own. The person who requested the approval sees “Approved: sending has started” with a link to the Jobs page, where the send can be followed.
  • Import Data or Generate PDFs — the step is unblocked, but the run does not move on by itself. The person who requested the approval continues with Proceed to Next Step.
  • The approver sees a confirmation, “You approved this request”, with no workflow actions.
• Reject — the step stays blocked.

4. After Rejection

The run’s owner is notified that the step was rejected. The notification and its email don’t include the comment — they link to the approval page (View Feedback), which shows any comments the approvers left. The owner can then fix the underlying issue (correct the data, adjust the template, and so on). Re-running the gated step creates a new approval request for another round of review.

Checking on an Email Send Awaiting Approval

While a send is held for approval, the Distribute Email tab shows a banner naming the approvers. Its View approvals link opens the run’s Send Emails approval status, and from there the pending request.

Reminders and Escalation

If a step sits awaiting approval, the app automatically re-emails the outstanding approvers on the interval configured for that step. After the configured number of reminders with no response, it escalates by notifying the run’s owner directly so they can follow up or resolve it another way. See Approval Settings for how to configure the reminder interval and count.

Notification Emails

The system sends emails at each stage:

Tips

• Enable approvals for high-value runs or when new team members are learning the system.
• Keep the approver list for each step small to avoid bottlenecks.
• The comment is optional, but leave one when rejecting — clear, actionable feedback saves a round trip.

Related

• Approval Settings — enable and configure approvals
• Team Members — manage who can be designated as an approver
• Email Setup — configure email delivery