Third option for Approval Workflows

I was wondering if there was any progress made toward enabling more than just two approval options? I would also like to include "Approve, Reject, Modify". And while the update requests work, I feel like these workarounds are unnecessary and tedious. If we could at least require certain fields be required to be answered in update requests that might make this workaround a little more bearable. I know there have been numerous people asking about this in the community.

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Comments

AndyM

Hi Team,

When using the built in approval flow, it only allows two buttons to be viewed. You can setup a new column with a dropdown and have more than two options that can be used (e.g. Approve, Declined, Defferred, Needs more Information), but in the approval flow you can only pick two of those four options. Please enable more than one button to be used! Thanks!

JM1

Agree. This is painful and forces us to use teams instead.

Karen Webber

I work with a number of approval processes where the request might be sent back more than once by the approver for an update or correction by the submitter before it comes back for approval again. Currently this involves including a resubmit button that the submitter has to tick (so that the automation reboots), plus more than one "approved" and "date approved" field to try and track the progress. It works, but it's unnecessarily complicated, submitters occasionally forget to tick the box (and then it falls through the cracks), it becomes ridiculously complex to plan for more than a couple of review requests, and it's pretty easy for the system to break.

I would love a "review" option along with the "approve"/"decline" options, with that option entering into a natural return loop until approve or decline is picked.

Quinn

Enabling us to add more options to the approval step would be tremendously helpful for a workflow I am currently building. I've made a workaround by telling approvers to decline and provide comments for requesters to respond to in an update request, but this isn't ideal.

CDE_OSS

I would be helpful to add additional options such as "need additional information" to the "approve" and "decline" options.

Andrew Macpherson

I'm trying to set up a Smartsheet for collecting information for new stock items.

I've got Form to collect the Data and then it gets sent to an Approver to check the Information.

I'd like Approver to be able to have the three Options but we are currently limited to two.

Approve - Yes we are stocking

Reject - No we are not stopping

Modify - We might stock but need more information.

I can set this up by using an Update request, Displaying the Form Data with Dynamic Placeholders and having a Dropdown with the Approve/Reject/Modify options. It works but is not as good as an Approval Workflow.

Crabe

Please add an additional 'button' to the approval workflow. Many times decisions are more than Yes or No / Approve or Deny.

In our position reclassification process we have situations which are not that simple - and would benefit from multiple options.
Example - one of our teams currently has an option of "Acknowledged" rather than approved or denied. Other times, the approver may want to hold off on making a decision and "Further Discussion" is needed.

From a quick glance at the Community posts and questions on this topic - it looks like many smartsheet users could greatly benefit from this type of feature.

andreadarcy

Yes, we wanted to have a third option recently in a workflow we created, "Approve" "Decline" "Counter Offer". It would be nice if you can add the ability to add additional buttons in these instances and allow the workflow to have additional paths for each button.

ktcran

We are using a "conditional" approval method with Approve/Decline where the approver types their conditions to approval in the comments and then hits Approve, as Decline puts a hard stop on the process. These comments can be easily overlooked or not seen by the relevant teams.

Has the third option been resolved yet? My team is in desperate need for this as well.

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