Glossary · Workflow design
Approval workflow
Also called: approval process, sign-off workflow, approval automation
An approval workflow is a process that routes a request (an invoice, an expense, a discount, a piece of content) to one or more designated people who must approve or reject it before it can proceed.
Approvals are among the oldest workflows in business, and among the most annoying when they live in email: requests get lost, nobody knows who's holding things up, and there's no record of who said yes.
The common patterns
- Single approver: one named person decides.
- First to respond: any of several approvers can decide.
- Everyone must approve: all approvers sign off (or one rejection stops it).
- Sequential: manager, then finance, then a director, in order.
- Threshold-based: the route depends on the value: under $1,000 auto-approved, up to $10,000 the manager, above that finance as well.
What makes one work
- Clear routing rules written down, so the workflow can apply them consistently.
- Context in the request: the approver shouldn't have to go and find the invoice.
- Deadlines and escalation: an approval waiting a week is a broken process.
- A record: who approved, when, and what they saw.
Approval steps exist in many tools: Microsoft Power Automate's Approvals, Zapier's Human in the Loop app, n8n's tool approvals. When comparing, look at where approvers act, whether they can edit before approving, how timeouts work, and what it costs per approval.
In Fluxo Flow
Approval workflows are built from a Router (threshold and risk rules) and one or more Human Review steps. Reviewers approve, edit or reject in the Review Queue, with assignees, priorities and timeouts; chaining two Human Review steps gives you sequential approval. Approvals aren't metered. The invoice approval template routes invoices of 5,000 or more to a manager by default.
Read next
Related terms
- Human in the loop (HITL)Human in the loop (HITL) is a design in which an automated process pauses at chosen points for a person to review, correct, approve or reject its output before it continues.
- WorkflowA workflow is a repeatable sequence of steps, started by a trigger, that turns an input (a form, an invoice, a new deal) into an outcome, with defined rules for each decision along the way.
- RBAC (role-based access control)Role-based access control (RBAC) is a way of managing permissions in which access rights are attached to roles (such as Admin, Editor or Viewer) and people get rights by being assigned a role, rather than permission by permission.
- Audit logAn audit log is a chronological, tamper-resistant record of who did what in a system and when, kept so that changes, approvals and access can be traced afterwards.
- API key vs OAuthAn API key is a static secret that identifies the caller and grants whatever access it was created with, while OAuth issues short-lived, scoped tokens after a user approves access; OAuth is safer for user-facing connections, keys are simpler for server-to-server use.