Approvals

Some things should not take effect because one person saved a form. Program → Approvals is the inbox for those, and Decision register is the permanent record of what was decided.

The inbox

Approvals has two tabs — Assigned to me and All pending — and three kinds of thing arrive in it:

• Policy versions submitted for approval before publication — see Policies.
• Risk scenarios submitted for review — see Scoring, treatment and appetite.
• Records routed through an approval workflow — contracts and vendors, when a workflow says this one needs a decision.

Each takes an Approve or a Reject, and a rejection carries its reason back to whoever submitted it rather than disappearing.

Approval workflows

Settings → Approval workflows is where you decide which records need approval at all. A workflow has three parts:

1. What it applies to — the register: contracts, or vendors.

2. Conditions — when it applies. A contract above a value, a vendor in a criticality tier, an arrangement supporting a critical function. All conditions must hold; for an either/or, write a second workflow.

3. Stages — who decides, and in what order. Stages run in sequence, so a two-stage workflow is “the owner, then the risk committee”, not both at once.

Workflows carry an order, because more than one can match a record and the order decides which governs.

Start with one workflow and one stage

Approvals are the fastest way to make a product feel slow. Route the records that genuinely need a second pair of eyes — the top criticality tier, or contracts above a threshold — and leave the rest to save normally. A workflow that catches everything gets approved reflexively, which is worse than no workflow because it produces a paper trail of decisions nobody made.

Delegation and limits

Settings → Delegation & limits covers who can decide on whose behalf and up to what authority. Related, and worth a look at the same time: Settings → Segregation of duties, which names the duty pairs that must never rest with one person and measures conflicts against your actual role assignments. Rules start in detection mode — nothing is refused until you promote them.

The decision register

The inbox empties; the Decision register does not. It is the append-only record of every approval decision, and it exists separately for a reason: the person who works the queue and the person who later asks “who approved this, and on what basis” are usually not the same person, and the second one is often an auditor.