Approval workflow software: 5 options to power your approvals

How should you choose approval workflow software?

All standard approval workflow tools should come with certain features by default, such as automated notifications, roles and permissions, an audit trail, and automated status changes when tasks get approved. 

But to find approval software that’s a cut above the rest, I advise you to also look out for:

• Interactive product tours, step-by-step tutorials, and videos that make it easy to learn the tool without requiring extensive training
• The ability to approve tasks in as few clicks as possible
• Excellent customer support through regular webinars, responsive support agents, and thriving support forums where users answer each other’s questions 
• Analytics to track approval times and identify bottlenecks so that the approval process can be optimized
• Compliance with industry security standards, such as SOC 2, so you know that your data is safe
• Either tiered pricing or flexible licensing so that the platform can scale with you as you grow 
• The ability to customize approval workflows by device, browser, approval stages, language, and user input 
• Integrations to pull in data for your approval forms from other apps or export your completed projects to other tools in your stack

Keep these factors in mind as you read through the following list of software options.

1. Wrike

Wrike is a versatile, customizable project management platform that’s used by 20,000 organizations worldwide, including large companies such as Siemens, Aveva, and Ogilvy. 

It’s ideal for managing approvals in workflows that are complex or have overlapping tasks, and makes signing off on tasks both faster and more efficient. 

Some cases where you could use Wrike to approve documents include:

• Budgets
• PTO requests
• External reports
• Invoice approvals
• New vendor requests
• Contracts
• Travel expenses
• Purchase orders
• Content review for social media campaigns

Make it easy to request approvals

Some approval tools will force you to fit your tasks into prewritten workflows that don’t really reflect your business processes. Instead, Wrike lets you create custom item types, which are unique tasks that move through a workflow that you can determine. 

You can also make a custom request form that collates all the necessary details for approval in one place, so it’s as easy to approve as possible. Using Wrike, it’s possible to get the approval process down to just one click on the approver’s side. 

On your form, you can select what needs to be approved, e.g., an attached file. From there, you can add the approver(s) to the form, select a due date, and include any additional documents that provide approvers with the necessary context to make the right decision. 

You can also request approval on a new folder or new project before it’s shared more broadly with the rest of the team by selecting “Add approval.”

Ensure approvals don’t get lost or forgotten 

Businesses that track their approvals manually commonly find that approvals get forgotten, or even lost entirely. Wrike eliminates this problem by giving project managers a series of controls and approvers a series of notifications to ensure they don’t lose sight of what they need to approve. 

Wrike gives project managers 100% visibility over the approvals process from their dashboard, so they can ensure that none get missed. They can add custom widgets that filter tasks by approval status, such as:

• Approved
• In consideration
• Needs revision
• In review

To see pending approvals for a particular task, or a record of comments and feedback, all they need to do is click on the task. 

Wrike also makes it easy for approvers to keep track of all the projects they need to sign off on. For example, an employee sending an approval request can use a custom task status to designate the individual approver who needs to approve that task. Wrike will then notify approvers when they need to make an approval, and any approvals in their list are prioritized by due date. This ensures that the most urgent approvals are tackled first. 

Facilitate easy communication between approvers and other team members

Teams that manage approvals over email often lose track of important messages, which means that projects get delayed while managers play detective and trawl through long email threads. 

In Wrike, all the communication between the person drafting a document and the person approving it happens in one central location, so there’s no risk of messages getting lost. It’s even possible for multiple approvers to work on the same document concurrently. 

If the approver doesn’t want to approve a particular document, they can make a change request in Wrike, send it back to the employee who originally drafted it, and give it a priority level so the employee has a sense of the required urgency. 

Once the approver is ready to share the document with external stakeholders, such as clients, they can also do that within Wrike by using the external requester collaboration feature to send an email. This accomplishes several things at once:

• The document gets shared.
• The external stakeholder gets asked for feedback.
• All the work associated with that document is kept within the task flow in Wrike, which acts as one central source of truth.

Much easier than going back and forth over email with multiple stakeholders!

Save time with intuitive automations

Managing approvals can sometimes feel like you need to do a lot of tedious manual labor in order to keep up with all the moving parts. Wrike’s automations eliminate a lot of this manual work. And they’re simple to use as well: just set up a when/then, as shown here:

Here are some examples of approval-related tasks that you can automate with Wrike:

• Share contextual details with approvers when creating a task, so that they have all the information needed to make the right approval decision.
• Send approvers reminders when a deadline is looming, or when a task is stuck in “Pending approval” for too long.
• Make approvals on a form conditional on having chosen a specific answer on that form.
• Send notifications to the person who’s responsible for the next stage of the approval process once you’ve changed the task status, and assign the task to that person. This could potentially mean sending the task back for revisions as well. 
• Add files to a task once it’s been approved.
• Deliver files to a shared folder once they’ve been signed off on. 

View details of past approvals

It’s sometimes helpful to be able to go through details of past approvals, perhaps to see how long a particular approval took, or to review comments made by a past approver on a similar project. Combing through a filing cabinet to do this is time consuming, but Wrike makes it easy. 

Whenever any sort of action is taken on a task, or any comment is made, Wrike automatically adds it to the stream of updates on that task. Naturally, some of those updates are related to approvals. Users can filter the stream of updates so they can find the approval-related ones quickly and easily.

For example, you can use this to find out:

• Who asked for an approval
• Who gave the approval
• Why approval was denied
• When approval was given
• How long the approval process took

Pass data back and forth with integrations

Approvals often require teams to pass data between tools in their stack, such as pulling data from your CRM to create an approval form or sending a project that’s been approved to a client’s Slack. 

Wrike comes with over 400 integrations that allow you to pass data of this nature back and forth easily, instead of manually. One of the most popular is our integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, which allows designers to share content and collaborate within Wrike. 

Other useful ones for approvals include:

• Salesforce, for pulling data from your CRM into your approval request forms
• Microsoft Teams, if you need to refer to a particular approval process during a call
• Slack, if you want to DM a coworker about an approval
• Dropbox, for reviewing historical archives of approvals 

Choose the best plan for you 

Whether you’re a budding startup, a scaling business, or an established enterprise, Wrike’s flexible software can cater to your unique needs. We offer a variety of pricing options (including a free plan), so you can choose the best one for your current situation. If you need to add more users as your business grows, we make that easy. 

Wrike goes beyond simple approval workflows. Our paid plans offer additional features that are important for managing approvals, such as unlimited request forms, unlimited tasks, user groups and permissions, and customizable user types. We also have powerful AI capabilities, customizable dashboards, reports, Kanban boards, Gantt charts — the list goes on.

Because we offer all-in-one collaborative work management software, you might find Wrike is more streamlined and cost-effective in the long run — no more juggling multiple subscriptions for disparate tools that don’t speak to each other. 

However, if you’d prefer to go with a more stripped-back option, here are four alternatives.