Approval workflows

Approvals let your team review responses in stages before they’re accepted. Use them for leave requests, purchase requests, applications, registrations and access requests. “Each response goes through the stages below in order. Approvers find it in their Approvals inbox, and only see responses at their stage.”

Available on Pro and above.

Set up stages

1. Open the form, then Settings → Approvals, and turn on Review new responses before they are accepted.

2. For each stage, set:

   Setting	What it does
   Approvers	Who reviews at this stage. Add an approver from People, Teams or Roles. A team or role includes everyone in it.
   Needs	one approver (the first decision counts) or every approver to approve.
   Only when…	Conditions on the answers. “(optional; otherwise every response goes through this stage)”. Example: a Finance stage only when Amount is greater than 50,000.
   Questions approvers see	Limit which answers this stage’s approvers can read, such as hiding salary from the first reviewer. “People who can already read this form’s responses always see every question.”

3. Add stage for the next level. Reorder with Move stage up / Move stage down, or Remove stage.

4. Under Tell the respondent, choose whether to “Email the respondent when their response is approved, rejected or needs changes” (needs an Email question on the form), or Don’t email respondents.

“Changes apply to new responses; responses already in review keep the stages they started with.”

Note

Approvals need someone to read individual responses, so they can’t be used on forms whose response privacy is Anonymous. Change it under Team & Sharing first.

Review responses

Open Approvals in the sidebar. It has two lists: Waiting on me and Decided by me. When there’s nothing to review, it says “Nothing waiting for you”. The Dashboard’s Needs attention also shows how many are waiting.

Open a response to review it. You see the answers your stage allows, the stage progress, and the History of earlier decisions. Then choose:

Decision	Result
Approve	Your approval is recorded. If the stage needs every approver, it waits for the others (“You have approved this stage. It is waiting for the other approvers.”). Otherwise it moves to the next stage, or is Approved after the last one.
Request changes	Sent back to the respondent with your comment. Status: Changes requested.
Reject	The response is Rejected and leaves the workflow.

A comment is required to reject or request changes: “Add a comment so the respondent and other approvers know why.”

Statuses

Status	Meaning
In review	Waiting at a stage
Approved	Every stage approved
Rejected	An approver rejected it
Changes requested	Sent back to the respondent