📷 Screenshots to be added.
The journey of one document
Take an expense claim as the example; every gated document type follows the same shape.- Draft. The creator fills it in. It’s fully editable and nothing has happened yet.
- Submit. The creator submits it. Two things happen at once:
- its workflow state moves to PendingApproval, and
- an approval request is created and the first approver is notified.
- Sign-off, step by step. The approval request walks down the rule’s steps. Step 1 must approve before step 2 is asked, and so on. Each approver gets notified when it’s their turn.
- Approved. When the last step signs off, the document is automatically moved to Approved — the accrual is posted, the payable exists, and it’s ready for the next stage (payment, disbursement, conversion, …).
- Or Rejected. A single rejection at any step stops the whole thing. Where the document lands depends on its type (see below).
For the person submitting
- You can’t submit twice. While a document has an open approval request you can’t start a second one — finish, cancel, or get the current one rejected first.
- You can’t approve your own document. Even if you also hold the approver role, the system skips you for your own submissions (see segregation of duties in Approval Policies).
- If an approver has a question, they can send it back to you as a query without rejecting. The document pauses, you get notified, and you respond — which returns it to the approver to continue. Only you (the submitter) can answer your own query.
- Rejected? You’ll typically get the document back as an editable Draft to fix and resubmit (expenses, invoices, bills, budgets, purchase orders), or it lands in a dedicated Rejected state (requisitions, advances, leave, reimbursements) — see the Document Types Reference for which is which.
For the person approving
- You’re notified when it’s your turn — not before. In a multi-step chain you only see a request once the earlier steps have signed off.
- You act with Approve or Reject on the document (or from your approvals list). You can also query it back to the submitter for clarification instead of rejecting.
- Approve advances to the next step, or finishes the request if you’re the last step. Reject ends the request immediately.
- Who counts as “you” for a step depends on how the step was configured — a role, a named person, or an org-resolved manager / department head (see the approver types in Approval Policies).
- Payment steps. If a step is a Payment step, approving it also marks the document paid — used at the end of expense, reimbursement and advance chains so the final sign-off and the pay-out are one action.
- Emergency override. A tenant administrator or super-admin can approve any step to unblock a stuck document — but even they can’t approve something they submitted themselves.
Amount-based routing
If your rules use amount bands, the document’s amount decides which rule (and therefore which chain) runs. A small expense might need only a manager; a large one might match a stricter rule that also requires Finance. You build this by creating one rule per band — see How several rules are chosen in Approval Policies.Why is my document “stuck in Pending”?
A quick checklist when something won’t move:- It’s waiting on a specific person. Check whose step it’s on. If the step is Submitter’s Manager or Department Head, confirm that person is set in the org chart.
- The only approver is the submitter. Segregation of duties blocks self-approval — the step needs someone else. Add another approver to the rule or have a different person act.
- A binding is too tight. If you added a role binding that points at the wrong or an inactive user, the transition can’t find anyone. Loosen or fix the binding.
- A query is open. If an approver queried it, it’s waiting on the submitter’s reply, not on the approver.