Approvals: how Loopfour asks before it acts

An approval is a pause in a workflow. The workflow stops at that point and waits until a named person approves or rejects. Use it wherever you want a person's sign-off before Loopfour acts, such as before a bill is posted or a payment run goes out.

How it works

• You name the approvers. The approval step lists the email addresses of the people who may decide.
• Loopfour tells them. The request goes out by email, to a Slack channel, or both. It also appears in Studio under Approvals, whether or not a message was sent.
• The run waits. While it waits, the run shows the status Waiting for approval.
• The first decision counts. As soon as one listed approver decides, the request is closed for the others. Their links and buttons stop working.
• The decision is kept with the run. The approval step on the run shows Approved, Rejected or Timed out, who decided, how they were asked and how long the request waited.

What happens after each outcome

When the time runs out, a workflow can be set to do something other than fail: hand the request to escalation approvers, approve it, or reject it. This choice is not on the step's settings in the editor. It comes from a template or from your developer. An automatic decision is recorded as made by "system", with a reason such as "Auto-approved due to timeout", so it is easy to tell apart from a person's decision.

Who can decide

• A listed approver, from the email, from Slack or in Studio.
• An owner or admin of your company, in Studio, even if they are not on the list. Studio records this as an owner or admin override, so the audit trail shows it was not the named approver. See Team and access.

People who are neither cannot decide. In Studio they see "This approval is assigned to someone else." In Slack they see "You are not an approver for this request."

What Loopfour does and does not do

• An approval step asks for one decision. The Require All Approvers switch on the step has no effect yet: the first approver to decide settles the request.
• A request sent by email is written for you by AI from the instructions you give the step. The approve and reject links in the email are added by Loopfour, not written by AI.
• When a request is escalated after a timeout, the escalation approvers are not sent an email or Slack message. They decide in Studio under Approvals.
• If a step has email or Slack set up but no message reaches any approver, the step fails straight away and the run shows why. If a step has no email or Slack set up, nobody is notified and the request waits in Studio.
• An approval cannot be undone once it is recorded.

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