Approvals

What Are Approvals?

Approvals provide a structured and traceable way to review and confirm important project information before it is finalised. Whether you’re managing tickets, documents, or design plans, approvals help ensure that every change or submission is reviewed by the right people at the right time.

Using approvals helps you maintain accountability, improve collaboration, and document decisions — giving your project teams a clear record of who approved what and when.

How Approvals Work

The approval process always follows a similar pattern:

1. Request: A user creates an approval request for a ticket, file, or plan.
2. Workflow: The request follows an approval workflow that defines the steps, reviewers, and deadlines.
3. Review: Assigned reviewers approve, reject, or comment on the request.
4. Completion: Once all required approvals have been given (or any rejection occurs), the final approval status is recorded and visible in the system.

Approval Workflows

Every approval request is based on an approval workflow — a defined process that determines who reviews what and when.

Predefined approval workflows act as reusable templates that define how approval requests are processed — including steps, reviewers, and deadlines. Administrators can create and manage these workflows so that project teams can apply consistent approval structures.

Read more in Create & Manage Approval Workflows and in Manage Approval Workflows of a Project.

Example of an approval workflow for submittals with two steps and one reviewer each:

Approval Requests & Workflows

When creating an approval request, you can either:

• Select a predefined workflow — use a company-standard approval process.
• Adjust the workflow — modify steps, reviewers, or deadlines (if permitted by the workflow settings).
• Define a workflow on the fly — create all steps, reviewers, and deadlines directly when requesting approval (not currently available for ticket approvals).

Types of Approvals

Approvals can be used in different areas of the platform, depending on what needs to be reviewed:

• Ticket Approvals — For reviewing and confirming tickets such as Submittals or Change Orders.
• Document Approvals — For reviewing uploaded documents, drawings, or other project files.
• Plan Approvals — For validating plan versions before they become active in a layer.

Each type uses the same underlying logic and workflows, but approval requests are created differently.

Ticket Approvals

Ticket approvals support countless use cases, because you can review and approve any kind of information gathered in your custom ticket forms – including all attachments. See Example Use Cases below.

• The requester must select a predefined workflow when requesting approval for a ticket.
  Before a workflow can be selected, it must be assigend to the form in the project. Read more in Manage Approval Workflows of a Project > Manage Workflows of Forms.
  Before a workflow can be assigned to a form, the form option 'Approval Workflows' must be enabled. Read more in Form Options > Approval Workflows.
• Once the approval process starts, the ticket is locked to prevent changes to any fields or attachments under review.”
• The ticket receives the final Approved status once all reviewers have approved it.
• If any reviewer rejects the request, the approval process ends. The ticket must be unlocked in order to make corrections before restarting the approval workflow.
• The approval applies to the entire ticket (including all attachments). There is no partial approval of single fields or files.
• The approval status of a ticket is visible in Approvals, Ticket Details, Tickets List View, and the Ticket Attachments View in Documents.

Read more in Request Approval for a Ticket and in Review & Approve Tickets.

Example of a Submittal Ticket ready to request approval:

Email Notifications for Ticket Approvals

The following rules define who receives email notifications during the approval process:

• Only the reviewers of the active step are notified when the request is:
  • Pending their approval
  • Due in 3 days
  • Due today
• All involved users — including the requester, reviewers, ticket creator, assignee, receivers (CC), and any users listed in custom user fields — are notified when:
  • An approval request has started.
  • An approval is overdue.
  • A reviewer approved, rejected, or commented on a request (Reviewers are not notified.)
  • All reviewers completed all approval steps.
  • An approval request was cancelled.
  • A ticket was unlocked (the approval status is deleted and the approval process is cancelled).

You can define for each workflow if you also want to notify receivers and users in custom user form fields.

Example Use Cases

With ticket approvals you can perfectly cover complex use cases like Submittals and Change Orders, adjusted to your company and project requirements.

Learn all about those use cases with detailed examples and complete explanations about how to set up and process them in practice.

Read more in Submittal Example: Overview and in Change Order Example: Overview.

Document Approvals

Request approval for any files saved in Document Management > All files.

• Use predefined workflows or create a workflow on the fly when requesting approval for files.
  Before a workflow can be selected, it must be assigend to the Documents section in the project. Read more in Manage Approval Workflows of a Project > Manage Workflows of Documents.
• A document approval request may contain up to 100 files. Each file is approved or rejected separately (contrary to ticket approvals, where the whole ticket including all attachments is approved or rejected).
• Document approvals are always requested for a certain version of a file. It is possible to upload and request approval for a new version of a file while another version has a pending approval request.
  Read more in Create & Manage File Versions.
• Reviewers need to have access to all files. If access control is enabled, they need to be at least Viewer. Read more in File/Folder Access Control
• If one reviewer rejected a file, the status is Rejected. However, other reviewers can still send their feedback.
• You cannot request approval for folders and for files under the deprecated Documents by layers.

Read more in Request Approval for Documents and in Review & Approve Documents.

Example of an approval request for two files before sending the request:

Approvals and Current Version

The file version number and approval status are shown for the current version in the file list, File Details tab and Versions tab. Also see Document Management > Document Versioning.

If a file is approved (e.g. V1 is approved and the current version) and then a newer version is pending approval (e.g. V2) it is indicated beside the approval status in the file list (e.g. current version showing as V1 and approval status as "Approved (V2 pending)").

If the version or approval status columns are not visible in the file list, click the file table's gear icon and ensure that you have configured the table to show these columns.

Remember, in the file list and file details the status is shown for the current version as defined above. Hence, status Rejected will only show there if no approved version exists yet.

File Operations and Approvals

Moving and renaming files pending approval is allowed. However, it is not possible to move a file to the Trash if it is pending approval. Duplicating is allowed; the new file will have no association with the pending approval.

Read more in Add & Manage Files/Folders.

Plan Approvals

Plan approvals work similar to document approvals, except that you start by uploading a plan to a layer, which only becomes the current plan version after it got approved. Currently you cannot select predefined workflows when requesting approval for plans.

Read more in Request Approval for Plans and in Review & Approve Plans.

Example of a layer with a pending plan approval:

Multi-Step Approvals

It is possible to add multiple steps for approval requests with one or multiple reviewers. During the review process, the next step will not start until all items have been reviewed by all reviewers in the active step.

For each step you set a duration or due date. If a step is overdue, all subsequent steps will automatically update their due dates to ensure the same review duration as defined per step.

Each approval request can have up to 20 steps and an unlimited number of reviewers.

Approvals Overview

View all pending, completed, and cancelled approval requests and filter them by project on the Approvals page. Quickly access views filtered by:

• Ticket Approvals
• Document Approvals
• Plan Approvals
• Pending Your Approval
• Created by You

Read more in View & Manage Approvals.

Example of a request pending your approval:

Approval Requests

Common behaviour of all approval request types:

• Once sent, the approval request cannot be modified. It can only be cancelled.
• Reviewers will get notifications about new approval requests and reminders for due dates three days before the due date, on due date, and when overdue. Also see Email Notifications for Ticket Approvals above.
• The subject of an approval request helps to identify it in the list of approvals. It is mandatory and should not be too long.
• The message of an approval request is included in the email sent to all reviewers and is visible in the approval request details. It is optional and allows the requester to share additional information with all reviewers.

Status of Approval Requests

All approval requests have one of the following statuses:

• Pending: some items are still pending feedback from reviewers.
  • Pending 1/3: in case there are multiple steps e.g. step 1 of 3 steps is active.
  • Pending your approval: in case you are a reviewer and have not yet approved or rejected.
  • Overdue: in case it is pending and the due date is in the past.
• Completed: all items have been approved or rejected by the reviewers.
• Cancelled: the approval request was cancelled.

Approval Status of Items

The items (tickets, files or plans) for which approval was requested have one of the following statuses:

• None (-): no approval has been requested for the item.
• Pending: approval is pending.
• Approved: item was approved by all reviewers.
• Approved with comments: in case at least one of the reviewers added a comment when approving.
• Rejected: item was rejected by at least one of the reviewers