Turn on Require Approval under Preferences on the Edit Form page and choose your Approvers. Every response to that form is then held at Awaiting Approval until one of those approvers opens it, signs, and clicks Approve Response. While it waits, nobody can edit it, including account owners. Approving also has to be done by hand: nothing approves itself after a delay.
Participants are labelled Clients, Students, Residents or Explorers depending on the account type. This article calls them participants.
Who can do this, and where
Both setting up approval and approving happen in the Equip web app. The mobile app can submit a response to an approval-required form, but it cannot approve or deny one.
To turn the setting on you need the Forms module set to Administrator on your role, or you need to be an account owner.
To approve or deny, you must be named in the form's Approvers list. Being an account owner is not enough on its own: an owner who is not listed sees no Approve or Deny button.
The Approvers picker only offers account owners and team members whose role is an administrator-type role. Supporter-type roles cannot be approvers.
Approval works on both custom forms and PDF document forms.
Forms is turned on for your account by the Equip team. If you do not see Forms in the left menu, ask us to enable it.
Turn on Require Approval
Click Forms in the left navigation and find the form.
Click the three dots to the right of the form and choose Edit Form.
Open the Preferences section. Turn on Require Approval, whose helper text reads "Does someone need to approve responses?"
An Approvers picker appears. Choose one or more people. Several approvers means any one of them can act, not all of them.
Click Update Form.
If you save with the toggle on and nobody chosen, the form is rejected with "Approver ids must be selected." shown against the Approvers picker.
Approve or deny a response
Open the form and find the response in the Responses list. It shows the Awaiting Approval badge.
Click the row. The response opens in a panel showing every answer, and the responder's signature if the form required one.
At the bottom, click Approve or Deny.
Approve reveals an Approver Signature panel with the note "Please sign below to approve that the information provided is accurate and complete." Sign by drawing or typing, then click Approve Response. The flash reads "Response was successfully approved!"
Deny reveals Reason for Denial. The reason is required. Type what needs correcting, then click Deny Response. The flash reads "Response was denied."
Limits and what the errors mean
The approver has to sign. There is no way to approve without a signature, whether or not the form requires one from the responder. Clicking Approve Response with an empty signature panel does nothing except mark the panel in red.
Awaiting Approval and Approved responses cannot be edited by anyone. To change one, an approver must deny it first. That lock applies to account owners too, so the approval record stays intact.
A denied response can only be edited by the person who submitted it, using Edit and Resubmit on the response. If the form requires a signature they must sign again, and a banner says "Editing this response will require the signature to be recaptured." Resubmitting confirms with "Response was resubmitted for approval." and sends it back to the approvers.
Denying requires a reason. Submitting an empty reason fails with "A comment is required when denying a response."
Response Notifications are held back until approval. On a form that requires approval, the people you subscribed under Response Notifications are not told when a response is submitted. Only the approvers are. The subscribers are notified once the response is approved.
The responder is told the outcome. Approving emails and notifies them with "You have a response that has been approved", unless they approved it themselves. Denying notifies them too, and if they answered through an invitation link they also get an email titled "Your form response has been denied" with an Edit and Resubmit button. That email reopens their original link, so a denial after the link expired is still fixable.
Download is limited while a response waits. A team member whose role acts as a Supporter cannot download an Awaiting Approval response. Approvers and administrators can.
Save & Finish Later comes first. A response saved for later is In Progress and has not entered approval at all. It only becomes Awaiting Approval when the responder clicks Submit Response.
Umbrella accounts cannot approve a sub-account's responses. Approval happens inside the account the response belongs to.
Turning Require Approval off later does not release responses that are already waiting. They stay at Awaiting Approval and stay locked, and Deny is no longer offered on them, so the only way forward is for a listed approver to approve each one. Clear the queue before you turn the setting off.
FAQ
Who can I choose as an approver?
Account owners and team members whose role is an administrator-type role. Supporter-type roles are not offered, so if the person you want is not in the list, their role is the reason.
Do all the approvers have to approve, or just one?
Just one. Any person on the Approvers list can approve or deny, and the first to act settles it. The form's page lists them under Requires Approval From, joined with "or", for exactly this reason.
I'm an account owner but I can't see the Approve button. Why?
Approving is restricted to the people named on the form, not to a permission level. Edit the form and add yourself to the Approvers picker, or ask one of the listed approvers to act.
Why didn't my notification subscribers hear about the new response?
On a form that requires approval, Equip deliberately notifies only the approvers when a response arrives. The Response Notification subscribers are told once it is approved, so they never review something that might still be denied.
Can I edit a response that's waiting for approval?
No, and neither can an account owner. The response is locked until an approver acts. If it needs a correction, have an approver deny it with a reason, and the original responder can then use Edit and Resubmit.
What happens after I deny a response?
It moves to Denied, the reason is recorded, and the responder is notified with a link to correct it. Only they can edit it. Once they resubmit, it returns to Awaiting Approval and any approver can look again.
Does the approver's signature show up anywhere?
Yes. The response gains an Approval section showing the signature, the date, and who approved it, and that section is included when the response is downloaded as a PDF.
Can someone approve on the mobile app?
No. Responses submitted from the mobile app to an approval-required form land at Awaiting Approval exactly as they do on the web, but approving and denying are web-only.
Related
Approving Forms
Denying Form Responses
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Get notified when someone submits a form
Why can't I find, edit or download a form response?
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