Multi-Step Approval Flow

Overview

We’re excited to announce improvements to the in-app approval workflow in Beefree. This option builds off the Approval Workflow available for Business and Enterprise plans. Enterprise users can now add steps to their approval workflow. This option provides users with more options to control the approval workflow. This can be especially helpful for multi-stakeholder workflows and for complex teams.

The step-based approval workflow allows multiple and sequential steps to the review process. Each approval can include up to five steps. One or more reviews can be added to each step in the workflow. 

Enterprise users can customize the approval workflow even further with Approval Management settings. Both of these options allow you to tailor the workflow to your organization's needs.

Prerequisites

To begin a multi-step Approval Workflow, ensure you have the following:

• A Beefree account on the Enterprise plan
• Any of the following user roles: Owner, Admin, Manager, Editor, or Contributor

Add steps to the approval workflow

Follow these directions to add multiple steps to your approval workflow for a design:

1. Log in to your Beefree account.
2. Navigate to the design you would like to have reviewed.
3. Click the Ask for review icon in the navbar. This opens a modal where you can add your reviewers. For more information on where you can find this icon, see Approval Workflow.
   
4. Add any internal or external reviewers you wish to include to the first step. In the drop-down menu, you can see a list of users from your workspace to include. For information on inviting reviewers outside of the workspace, see External Reviewers.
5. Click the +Add new step button to include another step to the approval process.
   
6. Add any internal or external reviewers you wish to include in your second step.
7. Repeat by adding more steps and reviewers as needed. You can create up to five steps in a single workflow. 
8. Customize the prewritten message if you’d like
9. Click the Start review button to begin the workflow. This sends the review request notification to all reviewers included in Step 1. 

Once the reviewers for the first step have all approved the design, it proceeds to the next step. This notifies all the step 2 reviewers that their approval has been requested, and so on. The design status will only change to Approved once all the reviewers in all the steps have approved it.

Review in progress

When the approval workflow begins, the app displays a modal with an overview of the process. You can add or delete reviewers to any steps that are still pending. As long as there are less than 5 steps, you can add more steps to the workflow from here. You can also resend or delete the review request, or delete any steps that have yet to receive approval.

You can find this information again by going to the design's Details page. From here, switch to the Review tab to see all this same information and options. The approval icon for any design awaiting approval will bring you right to this page. In-app approval notifications will also bring you here.

A checkmark populates by each user icon as they approved the design. Once all reviewers in a step have approved it, this step is shown as Approved. The next step will now display an In progress label.

Once the multi-step approval is complete, each step will have an Approved label. You will no longer see any options to add or modify steps. However, you can use the icon in the upper right to Start a new review.

Additional notes

• An individual requester can only be included in one step per Approval Workflow.
• The person who initiated the review receives in-app notification for each individual approver. These notifications prompt you to check the status of the review.
• The filter for designs ”Awaiting your review" only includes active review requests. In other words, if your approval has been queued, this filter won't show you the design.