[From Wrike] What's new in Approvals

Hello Lisa! This is an exciting feature enhancement. Do you have a status update about when this will go live?

Can you cancel an approval or change the approvers after the approval has been created?

@Heidi Hey, these improvements are live now 🎉

@Jenna Yes, you can do both!

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I have a question regarding this new functionality which now appears to cause some members of our team to have to provide their approval twice.  For our creative team, we assign a task with a file attached that needs to be reviewed.  The reviewer approves the file but at the task level, it still shows pending approval.    This also appears on their dashboards where it appears that they still have a pending review to complete which is causing some confusion since they have already "approved" it.   Is this the intended behavior?  Assuming the thought is that multiple files go through the review process and once all files are approved, the reviewer sets the task status to approved.  Is this correct or are we missing something?  Seems like extra work that is not necessary for tasks that only have one file attached.

I have the same question as Lorrie. We often have tasks that only require one file to be approved, so this seems like it's causing multiple approval levels. I could see this working if you were to have more than one file and content to approve in the task description, but that's not always the case. Keeping our list of approvals clean is hard enough as it is. I fear this will make things even worse.

I agree with Lorrie and Anna. It is a bit redundant having to not only approve the file, but approve the task now as well. My team focuses mainly on file reviews, so it would be helpful if the task was automatically approved/rejected based on the status of all the file reviews in the approval.This second step of approving the task has been causing confusion for our team and holding up some of our tasks.

Hey guys, thanks a lot for reaching out with your feedback!

This enhancement is the new way to not only approve the files but the overall task context, that is why the final task approval should be given. At the same time, there soon will be a feature to approve a task right after approving the file. This should be helpful when there's only one file in the task. It will also be helpful for setting up an agile workflow when you need to approve several files or files and the task context. 

By the time this feature is out of Labs, we'll add a Dashboard widget that will show all Approvals to ensure transparency.

Please let me know if you have any further questions 🙌

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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It would be helpful to be able to setup approval for one or the other (either the task OR the file) if you choose to do so. On our marketing/creative teams, the task content is a "launch" plan, and has to be approved long before the files are uploaded. The uploaded files are the final assets created for our digital partners to complete the launch plan. With this workflow, we'd have to "Approve" the work in the task three times and one of those approvals is a redundancy. It seems like it won't be an improvement if we can't choose the level of approval we need to suit our needs on each task.

In general our team struggled with the UI for this update. The files upload section is still in the middle of the task, below the description. If there's a lot of information in the description, you now have to scroll all the way back up to the top of the task before you can add someone as a reviewer and set the date for review. It would be helpful if the task approval area and the file approval area were in the same place in the task window. It's really hard to reconcile that info when it's in completely different places.

Will the All Approvals widget also be available on the mobile app?

Hi @Jessie, thanks a lot for your feedback, I've passed it to our Product team.

As for the All Approvals widget, there are no immediate plans for this, but it might change, so I'll keep you posted.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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I have noticed that if I post a document for review, and add text to the Approvals area, that text can never be modified again.

Example Issue: There was a requested edit to a document that was up for review. The change was significantly different from the original ask/review, and a new user was also added to the review process.  Once I uploaded the new document for review, I was unable to change the original text that I provided when establishing the first review to explain the drastic changes directly in the approval window. I had to add the comments to the task stream and hope that the approvers see the message.

Hi @Nicole! If I understood you correctly, you changed the content in the original approval and would like to let your team members know about it in the approval's description. Currently, it's not possible after you launch an approval, but I've let our Product team know about your case and they'll review your feedback. 

Thanks for reaching out! 

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Hi Lisa! I definitely love this new feature, but I want to suggest an improvement/addition that I think could bring added value.

I use requests to handle the ticketing system of my company and I was searching for a way to have them being closed only by the ones who opened them in the first place. So Approvals come in handy, since I have setted the workflow to set the activity as "Completd" when the approval process is passed. The problem is that for every request the approvals change.

Is there a way to have the owner of the request being automatically the person in charge for the approval process? I mean: I start a new request that will be auto assigned to one of my colleague, they'll work on the request and, when they mark it as "Done", I, the owner of the request, am automatically set as the approvator. If I approve, the request is marked as "Completed", otherwise it will return to "In progress" status.

Is this possible?

Thank you in advance

Marco Medeghini Hey Marco, welcome to the Community 🙂

Thanks a lot for your feedback! This functionality is actually planned for development, please stay tuned 🙌

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It appears once my Reviewers are Rejecting a document, they can no longer go into that document and change their decision (previously they were able to do this).

Example: There are situations where a user may Reject a document by mistake, or they think there is a change required that is in fact not required. They then have no way of going back in and changing their answer after marking it as Rejected.

It appears I have to go and start an entirely new approval for the document, requiring all reviews to re-enter the system and re-approve already approved art on their end. This is very tedious and time consuming since there are typically multiple users involved in the review process that are not always available on the same day to perform approvals.

I have just been testing to set up some Approvals that start when a Request Form is lodged. And it's looking really promising... Thanks for this functionality!!

However . . . we currently have a number of Request forms which create a new Tasks that use the Default Workflow. The problem is that I am unable to + Add Status with an Approval within the Default Workflow.

I can however + Add Status with an Approval in any custom Workflows that I have created.

Maybe this is an over-site which could be rectified, as I imagine there could be other users like myself - who are in the main using the 'Default Workflow' (albeit modified)

Hi Nicole Dalton, thanks for posting your use-case. The current logic is that if the last approver rejects, the approval process closes. I can suggest creating a new one and only adding one approver how gave an incorrect decision there. Hope this helps! 

Stephen Quinn thanks for your feedback, I've passed it on to the Product team and I'll get back to you when I have info on this! 

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Lisa thanks for that. 👍

Lisa This feature looks great. I am not able to attach a file to an approval, has this feature not been rolled out yet? 

Hi Aaron McLaughlin! Being a part of Wrike Proof functionality, File Approvals are available on Wrike for Marketers and Wrike for Marketers Enterprise accounts. If you're on Professional, Business, or Enterprise subscription, you can purchase Wrike Proof as an add-on. I've added the link to the dedicated page to the post above, here it is just in case. 

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I am glad that there is an option to choose "Approve only files" but wish there was a way to do this automatically through the change in workflow! Right now, all approvals created by the change in status include a task approval by default, with no apparent way to change this. My team primarily reviews files, and task approvals are redundant for us. Will an option to generate file-only approvals by status change be added?

Something else that would also be helpful are additional choices for Approvers. We'd really benefit from "Rejected" and "Approved with Changes" options. Sometimes there are tasks that include concept items and we need a better way to distinguish which options or versions are not approved for a particular marketing plan so we know what to move forward with. Other times, a minor tweak is necessary, but we want to trust the people completing the work to make the change without having to put the whole file or task through the approval process again.

Hayley Harline This enhancement is planned by our team, please stay tuned for the updates 🙂

Jessie Stith Our team is considering to implement this, but I can't promise anything yet. Thanks for suggesting! 

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Hi Lisa!

Thanks in advance for your response. 

When selecting multiple approvers, is there a way to make Wrike allow move to the next status with just one of the approvers giving their consent? It could be interesting for us to use this for our IT approval processes, where any of our multiple architects can approve certain steps of the workflow.

Regards

Jose Alminana - we had a similar need, and our solution works great, but requires Wrike Integrate. See this post for more information on how we solved for this need: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360037777113

The piece of this process that addresses your need is within the Wrike Integrate recipe at https://www.workato.com/recipes/1051624, where we check for a single approval from a pool of potential approvers.

This example business process is highly specific to our company's needs and is admittedly a bit confusing... I'm happy to consult on modifying this for your needs if you want help. 

Jose Alminana thanks for reaching out! Our Product team has this planned for 2020, I'll let you know when I have more details 👍

Laura Boylan thanks a lot for sharing! 🙂

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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How do you add reviewers once the approval has been started?  I see others asking the same question, but I don't see an answer.

Nevermind, I figured it out. Oy!

i do not like how the new approval process makes you re-enter the whole process again after there has been a "rejected" file that needs changes. i used to be able to make my changes when i received a "changes needed" and upload new file for approval and it would alert the approval that it needed to be looked at again. now, you have to start the whole process again - seems redundant and it is annoying! is there a way around this? ty

Hi Michelle Brown, welcome to the Community! 🙂

It is possible to change that setting in the Advanced settings:

It is also possible for the Account admins to set up default settings for this:

Please let me know if that helps! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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