Policies & stages

How policies, stages, and routing modes shape a workflow.

A policy is the reusable blueprint for approving a kind of request: a submit form plus an approval route made of ordered stages. One policy can serve every request of that kind.

Approval modes

Each stage declares how its approvers combine:

• Any one approver: the first approval completes the stage.
• All approvers: every approver must approve.
• One after another: approvers act in sequence.

Who approves a stage

• Anyone with a role: every active holder of the role, for example manager.
• A role in a department: the holders of a role inside one department, either the requester’s own department (“the manager of whoever submitted it”) or a specific one (“Finance reviews everything”).
• Specific people: named members from the directory.
• External emails: people outside the workspace, through external approvers.

Parallel branches

Stages that share a position run at the same time as a parallel group. Use Add parallel branch in the builder, for example to let legal and finance review together. Each branch can carry its own condition, so a branch that does not apply is skipped while the others run.

SLAs & escalation

A stage may carry an SLA in hours. If it lapses, pending assignments escalate to a fallback role so work never silently stalls. See SLAs & escalation.

Conditional routing

A stage can always run, run only when a condition holds, or be skipped when it holds, and a rule can approve a request automatically. This keeps one policy flexible instead of many near-duplicates. See conditional rules.

Delegation & external approvers

Approvers can delegate during leave (scoped and time-bounded), and a stage can route to people outside the org through a single-use magic link plus a one-time code.