Handling approvals

When a rule says an operation should wait for a person, the run pauses at that point and the operation appears in approvals. This is not an exception path — it is one of the three normal outcomes an operation can have, alongside completing automatically and being refused. See Operations and rules.

Finding what is waiting

Approvals lists every operation currently waiting on a decision, across the runs that produced them. Each entry names the operation, the record it applies to, and how long it has been waiting. If your organization uses groups to route work, what you see here may be scoped to the operations your group is responsible for. See Organization for how that scoping is set.

What the approval shows

Opening an entry shows what the run has done so far and what it is asking permission to do next: the operation, the record it would act on, and the values involved — the invoice amount, the ticket being closed, the payment being posted. Anything the rule specifically flagged, such as a mismatch or a threshold being crossed, is shown along with the reason it triggered the approval.

This is enough to decide without needing to open the full record, though the full record is one click away if you want the run's earlier history. See Reading the record.

Approving or rejecting

Approving lets the operation proceed. The run resumes from where it paused and continues as if the operation had completed automatically, with the approval itself added to the record.

Rejecting stops the operation from happening. The approval is marked rejected, and the run resumes from where it paused — the same way it does after an approval, not by ending or being abandoned. What the run does with a rejected operation is part of the record it continues from: the operation did not complete, and the run proceeds from that point knowing that. See Operations and rules.

Either way, the decision is recorded: who made it, when, and what the run does next.

After the decision

Once an approval is resolved, it leaves the waiting list and the run's record shows the decision alongside everything else that happened in that run. A pattern of approvals that are consistently granted with no changes is often a sign the rule could complete automatically instead; a pattern of frequent rejections is a sign the rule needs tightening. Both are reasons to revisit the definition — see Revising a definition.