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 gates -- Import Approval, PDF Approval, or Email Approval -- 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 -- opens a secure, token-based approval page that needs no login, so approvers who aren't regular users of the app can still respond.
- 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.
3. Approve or Reject
- Approve -- once the requirement is met (see Approval Settings for how "met" is defined), the step unblocks and the run continues automatically.
- Reject -- the step stays blocked and a comment explaining what needs to change is required.
4. After Rejection
The run's owner sees the rejection reason and can 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.
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:
| Event | Recipient | |-------|-----------| | Step awaiting approval | All approvers designated for that step | | Reminder | Approvers who haven't responded yet | | Escalation | The run's owner, after reminders are exhausted | | Approved or rejected | The run's owner (rejections include the reason) |
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.
- Use the rejection comment to give clear, actionable feedback.
Related
- Approval Settings -- enable and configure approvals
- Team Members -- manage who can be designated as an approver
- Email Setup -- configure email delivery