Approval Management

Overview

Beefree’s approval workflow has been enhanced to provide additional options. These Approval Management options are available to owners, admins, and managers. They are located in the workspace General Settings. 

The following options are available:

1. Enable or disable manual design statuses, making only the Approval Workflow available.
2. Once a design has been approved by a reviewer, limit editing permissions to the approvers.

These options provide stricter control over the approval flow inside Beefree. They help to ensure your whole team is aligned on both processes and approved content.

Prerequisites

To use these features, ensure you have the following

• A Beefree account on the Business or Enterprise Plan
• A user role of Owner, Admin, or Manager to access the workspace General Settings

Disabling Manual Design Statuses

Design Statuses are a feature available to all Beefree plans. The Approval Workflow is a premium feature available to Business and Enterprise plans. With the Approval Workflow, a design status populates based on the review status. Having two options for initiating a review can sometimes lead to confusion or miscommunication. 

You can disable manual review statuses to limit the review options in Beefree. This ensures that the whole team must follow the same approval workflow. 

When design statuses are disabled, we record all manually-applied statuses in the account. These statuses are restored if you re-enable design statuses. 

Limiting Editing Permissions Upon Approval

Preserve the integrity of your designs by limiting editing permissions for approved designs. When this option is turned on, it will limit editing permissions for designs where:

• A review has been requested
• At least one reviewer has approved the design

Once someone approves the design, this limits editing permissions to the reviewers. This gives you peace of mind that approved content will not be altered unexpectedly. It can also help you avoid any confusion created by unauthorized edits. 

Unauthorized Editors

Non-reviewers can still view and comment on approved designs inside the builder. A notification at the bottom of the builder informs non-reviewers of their options.

Non-reviewers can also interact with the builder navbar. Here they can access features such as the in-builder preview, test emails, and more.

Unauthorized editors can use the button to Unlock editing. This prompts a warning to let them know that:

• the approval will be discarded
• all reviewers will be notified of the change.

If Discard review and edit is clicked, all reviewers are notified. The changes to both the design and the Approval flow are also recorded in the Design History. This makes it easy to restore the previously approved version if someone makes a mistake.