Reviewing and Responding to Approvals

How to review and respond to pending approval requests.

Overview

When a workflow reaches a Human node, the execution pauses and a pending approval is created for every approver assigned to that node. Reviewing and responding is how you unblock the workflow - approving lets it continue, rejecting ends it with a failure.

All your pending approvals across the workspace are listed on the Approvals page. You only see requests you are eligible to act on, based on the approvers configured on each Human node.

Before You Start

You need to be a workspace member.
You must be named as an approver on the Human node.

Steps

Open Approvals from the sidebar.
Select the Pending tab. Requests are sorted by urgency (high, then normal, then low).
Click an approval to open its detail panel. You will see the workflow name, the message the author wrote, who triggered the execution, when it was created, and the urgency.
Review the linked execution if you need more context - the panel includes a link to the running execution and the steps that ran before the pause.
Click Approve to resume the workflow, or Reject to end it.
The request is removed from Pending and recorded in History with your name, the decision, and the timestamp.

What You See on the Approval

Workflow - The workflow that is paused.
Message - The text the author configured on the Human node, with variables substituted from the running execution.
Requested by - The user (or trigger) that started the execution.
Created at - When the request entered the queue.
Urgency - low, normal, or high.
Expires at - When the timeout will fire and fail the execution.

What Happens After You Respond

Approve - The workflow resumes from the next step. Your decision is logged.
Reject - The workflow execution ends with a rejection error. Downstream steps do not run.
No response before timeout - The execution fails with a timeout error. The request moves to History marked as expired.

Tips

Sort by urgency in busy workspaces and clear the high-priority items first.
If the request lacks context, open the linked execution and inspect the prior step outputs.
Approving or rejecting is final - there is no undo. If you change your mind, re-run the workflow.
Turn on email notifications on critical Human nodes so approvers don't have to keep the Approvals page open.

Common Pitfalls

Approving without reading the message - the workflow may do something irreversible.
Letting requests sit until they expire. A timed-out approval fails the whole execution, not just the step.
Assuming someone else on your team will act - any one eligible approver can resolve the request, so coordinate when multiple people are watching the same queue.
Looking for an approval that never arrived. Check that you are named as an approver on the Human node.