Is anyone using Monday.com to manage approvals? If so how are you using file management, assignment workflow and final docs?
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I would be very interested in hearing how others are using Monday for this as well, specifically in regard to the file management portion of approval processes.
We currently use Monday for a variety of âlightweightâ approval processes just using checkboxes, and automations to ping others (teams or people) when its their turn for review (Monday has been GREAT for that). But I say âlightweightâ because our document-based approval processes are still rooted in legacy SharePoint workflows, since they involve PDF markups/edits and version control/auditing capabilities from SP. Iâve always wondered how Monday could be leveraged for this kind of thing, if at all. So along with Kimberly, I too am interested to hear if anyone is pushing the envelope w/ Monday specifically for document-based approval processes.
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This is a question I have asked a couple of times. Version tracking is of course extremely important for designers of all industries. Up to now there isnât any way to version track with the ability to lock out downloading existing versions. The way I make sure that the latest version is always downloaded is I reply to an amendment update from my client with proof attached and include the latest version of the artwork. The latest update is defaulted to the top. I hope that MONDAY come up with a solution for this soon. The system is brilliant apart from this. Also to have the ability to mark up directly onto MONDAY to return would be amazing.
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If Monday developed this I believe they would be unstoppable.
Kimberly
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Hey folks, great conversation so far and thank you for your ideas on this front. Iâd also like to welcome @mdowell and @Glen to the Community!
Managing iterative document approval is something thatâs most definitely on our teamâs radar, and something for which we hope to have a smoother solution in the future. While I canât provide a solid ETA, itâs something we look forward to developing along with the rest of our platform.
If youâve got further suggestions, ideas, or even mockups of how youâd like this to look, let me know and Iâll happily discuss with my team! Thanks everyone!
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We are a screen print shop and I would like to use the approval process for customers to be able to review and approve their own art. I have set up a board, created a couple of test pulses - and assigned guests that are just hotmail accounts that myself and another employee have so that we can test. I have restricted the ability for updating columns to just the guest for that pulse. What I donât like is that the guest can update ANY other pulse on the page. Is there anyway to restrict the update of the pulse to only the pulse that the guest is assigned to? Make sense? I want to just use one board for guest art approval and it could have 20+ pulses with guest approvals waitingâŠ
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I would love to see a good review solution in monday.com. At this moment I use automation to do very simple review process. For that my board holding documents. I use 2 columns to âholdâ files, a file column is used for final versions (mostly pdf) and a link column is used for editing document. The link point to either a shared Word doc on Onedrive or a shared Docs dos on Gdrive. In both situations clicking the link allows for real multi user editing.
The review proces is built with two columns. One column (Status) holds the document status (Assigned, Working on it, For review, Finalized) where the other column (Reviewed) holds the review status (Wait, Pls review, To Bronze, To Silver, Finalized). The board has three groups (Bronze, Silver, Gold). The automation changes the Reviewed column depending on the Status column. The two screenshots shows the 9 automatons to achieve this. At this moment both the reviewers and the authors need to be part of the Team column as I use board permission "Edit rows assigned to Team column).
Ideally I would see that authors can change anything except the Review status and Reviewers can only change the Review status. I tried to use column permissions (which is a great first step) but unfortunately I need to âhardâ mention users there and can not point to a column (eg. Authors and Reviewers) that holds the name of these users.
Hope this helps setting up a review system and hope monday.com will add column permissions based on persons column(s) instead of user names.
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Have you checked out the board permission:
I think this would help if the guests are actually assigned in a person column to the item relating to them?
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Thank you so much for sharing 
I think lots of users will find this very interesting!
Just to clarify, you want the column permissions to allow for locking of columns except to anyone except those assigned in a person column, whether thats a team or multiple people/single person?
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Hi @Julia-monday.com, thank you for looking into this.
Ideally the row (pulse) is locked down for editing for everyone (board permissions) as you donât want a document author or reviewer to change eg a due date. Then there are 4 columns (2 sets of 2) involved:
- person column with author(s)
- document status column that can only be changed by people listed in (1) / and board owners
- person column with reviewers(s)
- review status column that can only be changed by people listed in (3) / and board owners
Automation should be able to change status columns 2 and 4 regardless of column permissions.
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Julia,
We have a similar approval process we follow. However, because there are 2 people in a pulse, both people will have a âto-doâ assigned to them, regardless of the state of approval. How do you suggest we work to have approvals in our process with have very clear accountability of Next Steps and by Who on My Week?
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This is the solution that I am looking for too Beth⊠if Monday.com can allow guests to choose âApprovedâ or âDeclinedâ from within an email notification, then I would have been able to automate my entire client process with this one platform. Fingers crossed.
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Late to the party here but we use Ashore for our Proofing. I was talking to them yesterday about integrations (Zapier) and I know theyâre working towards that with their new platform. Maybe thereâs a more direct integration opportunity there?
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Hi @truth.designs.82! While there isnât a way to set a status from an email, you are able to set your board permissions to âEdit rows assigned to them in the Person column,â as Julia mentioned above. That would only allow users/guests assigned in the chosen column to edit the items associated with them. This restriction would not apply to board owners.
If you need to set restrictions at the column level, you can click the dropdown menu for the particular column and select âColumn Permissionsâ > âRestrict Column Editâ to define who can make edits to your columns!
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Hey @thekvd - great suggestion! Happy to pass this to our team 
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Hi Kacey,
I saw this note you wrote. Any progress on approval process from Monday.com? From our side, making sure the approver is the only one who can approve is critical. (I see the note that came later in this thread that may provide all I need in this regard). Also, being able to generate an overview report of which documents were approved when and by whom is super important. To facilitate this, a reference number for each document/approval iteration done is needed. I see Item ID, which should suffice. I intend to have the documents being approved or edited in a collaborative way being stored in GDocs.
Any info you have on what Monday.com has done or for that matter if anyone else has made progress on this, would be super helpful.
Matthew
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All,
Donât know if the solution I created in Integromat suits your needs. The solution I created uses 3 person columns (owners, authors and reviewers) and 2 status columns (document status and review status). The board has permissions set to edit when listed in the âownerâ column.
When document status is set to assigned the authors are copied to the owners, so they have control. Whenever the author set the status to âPlease reviewâ the reviewers are copied to the owners column and therefore the reviewer is now in control. He/she can set the review status. After reviewing (in my case he can assign Bronze, Solver or Gold) the item is moved to the Bronze / Silver / Gold group and assigned back to the author.
When authors are in control they canât change te review status, this is the same for reviewers that canât change document status. Technically they can change, but the change is immediately rolled back to the previous state.
This is the closest I could get to a full approval proces. Please sent me PM if you need more detailed information.
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Thanks. This sounds like a very reasonable solution for controlling who can approve a given document. Iâll try it out. It seems to dovetail with the way I was heading already (without the permissioning bit.
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One very simple solution that Monday could implement is to connect a people column to a date+status or a timeline+status. This way the task/item would only appear to the person on the moment it needs action taken.
I have something similar implemented but since I canât connect a people column to a specific date+status, it gets a bit messy with the dates.
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@Monday.com It seems like you guys are moving fast on development. Is there any progress in the way of approvals specifically? In particular, a simpler way to manage who can approve what? I was hoping to be able to have groups rather than individuals be able to give a certain approval (and they would be the only ones who would be able to give that approval). In terms of workflow, approval seems to me to be such a cornerstone application.
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