Want to sign off on a sales document before your reps can send it out? Click here to learn how.

Oversight is an important part of any company's workflow. Here at Proposify, we recognize that knowing which documents are going out and whose sending them is a key element in the process. 

If you’re wondering how to beef up oversight on your sales docs, you’ve come to the right place.

Set Up Approval Workflow

In your Navigation Bar, select the Users icon to reach the Users page.

Select roles and permissions at the top right of the page.

This will bring up a list of roles for users on your account. “Admin” is the default setting. It has access to every part of the account except billing and account management.

To create a new user role, select add role at the bottom right:

Now you can decide what permissions to allow each user. Not sure where to begin? We’ve got a handy guide for roles here. For now, we’ll focus on the send permissions segment of this page. You can find it at the bottom.

From send permissions, enable requires approval before sending documents.  

Next, select the approving role from the dropdown menu. You can select a secondary role to approve as well. We recommend adding a secondary role in the event your primary role is away.

NOTE: Selecting an approving role will only provide a list of people to notify that a document is ready for approval. Anyone in a role that can send a document without approval can review.

Extra Settings:

Approval Settings

If you only want to approve documents that reach a certain value, enter your threshold amount in Document Value:

Any document with a value equal to or above this threshold will require approval.

If your pricing strategy relies on optional fees, you can include approval workflows to any document that contains optional fees. To do this, enable Optional fees require approval:

NOTE: This setting will trigger the need for approval with any optional item in your table, regardless of document value.

Watermark unapproved documents

Enable Watermark PDFs for unapproved documents to ensure roles requiring approval are showing that the document is still a work-in-progress.

If a user assigned to this role downloads a PDF of a document in Draft or Awaiting Approval state, a “DRAFT” watermark will appear on every page.

Allow Users to cancel approval requests

Enable this option to allow the role to make edits to documents that are pending approval or have been approved. They will need to re-submit their document to approve the new changes.

If cleared, the role will be unable to make edits once approved.

Allow users to edit documents after sending.

Enable this option to allow the role to make edits to a document sent to your prospect. If a user requiring approval makes edits to a sent document, though, they will need to re-submit for approval.

If this option is cleared, roles requiring approval will be unable to edit documents after they’ve been sent.

HEADS UP: If this option is enabled, clients who’ve already received their Preview Link will be able to view all changes by refreshing their browser, regardless of whether they’re approved.

Once you’ve set your preferred approval workflow, select save role at the bottom of the menu to save these changes. All that’s left now is to assign users to these roles. You can read about how to assign roles to users here.

What Each Role Sees

When a document is in Draft State:

When a document is in a Draft or Awaiting Approval state, there’ll be no share links available for the user requiring approval. Here is the Snapshot page for a document created by a user named Lee. Lee requires approval before sending a document.

Lee has:

• No links in signature recipients.

• Clicking the send icon will bring up the request approval menu.

• No ability to move the document to a new state (sent, won, lost)

What’s more, the copy url button in this document Preview will also be removed.

Here is the same snapshot from the account of Allan, who does not require approval before sending:

• The links in signature recipients are present.

• Selecting the send document icon will bring the user to the Send page.

• The mark as menu will change, letting this user either approve/reject the document (if in Awaiting Approval) or move the document to another state.

In Client Preview mode, Client Preview Link in the preview mode banner will be present.

Finally, if Allan downloads a PDF copy of the document, no watermark will appear.

Submit A Document For Approval

To request approval from the snapshot, select the send document icon at the top right of the page:

You can also select request approval from the document Editor:

The Request Approval menu will appear with a list of available approvers.  

Choose who to notify, then select send to send an email to an approver.

NOTE: Any user who can view this, and doesn’t require approval to send, can review and approve this document. Selecting a user here won’t limit who can review your document, you’re just choosing who to notify.

Awaiting approval

When the request is sent, the User will be returned to the Pipeline and see a confirmation banner. Their activity will be logged in both feeds. The document is now in Awaiting Approval.

The Snapshot Activity Feed will also keep track of approval progress. Lee can send a reminder to Allan at any time to let him know that this is still pending approval. Users needing approval can also send a notification to another user if they need this reviewed ASAP.

HEADS UP: We want to keep a clear activity log of what happened to this document. Once a document is in Awaiting Approval state, all share links are disabled for all users, even if they don’t need approval to send. This will need to leave Awaiting Approval state, either by approving or rejecting it, in order to send this document again.

Similarly, on the Pipeline the [...] menu will show an option to request approval. This will pull the same request approval menu.

Review A Document

To review a document, select one currently in Awaiting Approvals state:

If you’re confident about this document, you can choose to approve or reject the document from the Snapshot page from the mark as menu:

Otherwise, select Review to enter the document Editor.

Here, you’ll be able to make manual edits and comment on a page. To make reviewing easier, you’ll also be able to tell at a glance what pages the user requesting approval has edited:

Review the document, make changes and comment as necessary, then select either approve or reject from the top right of the page:

We’ll notify the document lead and the person who requested approval when you’ve made your decision.

If rejected:

If a document is rejected, the person who requested approval will be notified by email and the document will be returned to Draft state. The activity feed will let them know who rejected the document, as well as any comments left by the reviewer:

At this point, there are still no external links that can be forwarded to prospects.

If approved:

If the document was approved, the person requesting approval will be notified by email. The activity feed will also show who approved the document. All share URLs will return and the user can send the document as normal:

Remove Approval Workflow On Your Templates

Not every document needs approval before going out. To deactivate approval workflow on your documents, head to the Template Editor. From there, select the notepad icon in the menu pane to open Template Settings:

From there, enable the checkbox next to Does not require approval:

This will disable the approval workflow for this document.