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Request and give approval on a document

Send a document for approval, and approve or reject one you've been asked to review.

Team plan

An approval is a sign-off that a document is correct: a manager confirms that a procedure is the way your team should work. Wikidoc records who approved it, when, and any note they left.

How approval works

Section titled “How approval works”
  1. An Admin chooses the document’s approvers: Managers or Admins.
  2. The author clicks Request Approval. The approvers are notified.
  3. An approver clicks Approve or Reject, and can add a note. The author and the document’s owners are notified.

Nobody can approve a document they created, even an Admin. That keeps every sign-off independent.

A document’s approval is one of Not submitted, Pending review, Approved or Rejected. It shows next to the document in Files, and at the top of the editor.

Choose the approvers

Section titled “Choose the approvers”

Admins do this once for each document that needs approval.

  1. Open the document’s governance details: in Files, click ⋯ next to it, then Governance. Or open the document and click Panel.

  2. Under Approvers, search for a Manager or Admin and click + Add.

    The document's governance panel scrolled to Approvers: priya.nair is an approver, and a search box lists Hannah Cho, Olivia Grant, Marcus Bell and Samuel Whitaker to add, with the note that only members with Admin or Manager roles can be assigned as approvers
    Only Managers and Admins can be approvers.

Request approval

Section titled “Request approval”

  1. Open the document and click Panel at the top right. Or, in Files, click ⋯ next to it, then Governance.

  2. Under Approval, click Request Approval.

    The Patient Check-In Process document open with its governance panel: Status Draft, Owners tom.fletcher, Team No team, Approval Not submitted, and the Request Approval button highlighted
    Request Approval sends the document to its approvers.

The approval changes to Pending review, and each approver gets an email and a notification.

If Request Approval is grayed out with No approvers are assigned yet, ask an Admin to choose approvers first.

Approve or reject a document

Section titled “Approve or reject a document”

When you’re asked to approve a document, it appears on your Home under Needs your attention.

The Needs your attention block on Home with two items: a checklist, Daily clinic opening, submitted for sign-off, and the document Reschedule Patient Appointment, Approval requested, tagged Your approval, with its Review highlighted
Documents waiting for you are listed on Home.

  1. Click Review, or the link in your email, to open the document. Then click Panel at the top right.

  2. Read the document. Then, under Approval, click Approve or Reject.

    The Reschedule Patient Appointment document open read-only for the approver, with the governance panel showing Approval Pending review and the Approve and Reject buttons highlighted
    Approve if it's right; reject it to send it back.

  3. Add a note if you like: what’s good, or what needs changing. Then click Confirm Approve or Confirm Reject.

    The approval panel with the note Clear and matches how we reschedule. Approved. typed in, and the Confirm Approve button highlighted beside Cancel
    Your note is sent to the author and kept in the approval history.

The document’s author and owners are notified of your decision, with your note.

After a decision

Section titled “After a decision”
  • Approved: the document stays approved until someone saves a change to it. Saving changes the content that was signed off, so the approval goes back to Not submitted and needs requesting again. Wikidoc marks the badge clears on save while there are unsaved changes.
  • Rejected: fix what the approver asked for, save, and click Request Approval again. The author can click Create a task for the rework to track the changes on a task board.

Every request and decision is listed, with notes, under Approval History on the Versions tab. See Document governance.

If something goes wrong

Section titled “If something goes wrong”

I don’t see Approve or Reject. You’re not one of the document’s approvers, or you created it. Ask an Admin to add you as an approver, or ask another approver to review it.

“You created this document - approval must come from another approver”. You wrote the document, so someone else has to approve it.

“Approval workflows require a Team plan”. Approvals are on the Team plan. See Upgrade your organization to Team.

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