SpotDraft's approval feature is a critical component of contract workflows, ensuring that key stakeholders are involved in the approval process. This guide explains how to set up approvals, define conditions for specific approvals, and the order of approval collection within a workflow.
What are Approvals?
Approvals in SpotDraft are a way to create mandatory steps within a workflow where certain users or teams must review and approve a contract before it can proceed to the next stage. This helps ensure:
- Accountability: Clearly defines who is responsible for approving contracts.
- Standards Check: Provides an opportunity for stakeholders to ensure the contract meets internal standards and requirements.
- Compliance: Ensures that necessary internal approvals are obtained, especially for legally sensitive contracts.
How to Set Up Approvals?
- Navigate to the Workflow Manager:
- Go to the "Manage" section on the side navigation panel.
- Click on "Workflow Manager."
- Select a Workflow:
- Click on the workflow for which you want to set up approvals.
- This will open the workflow details page.
- Go to Approvals Settings:
- On the workflow details page, you'll see a section on the left-hand side labeled "Additional Options."
- Click the "Approvals" button.
- Configure Approvals:
- You'll see three tabs: "Pre-Send Approvals," "Pre-Sign Approvals," and "Approval Preferences."
- You can select Pre-Send Approvals or Pre-Sign Approvals as per your requirements. For this example let’s click the "Pre-Send Approvals" tab. This section sets up approvals before the contract is sent to the counterparty for review.
- Set Up a Pre-Send Approval:
- Click on "Click to set up" under the "Pre-Send Approval" section to open the “Add Approval” sidesheet.
- Click on "Click to set up" under the "Pre-Send Approval" section to open the “Add Approval” sidesheet.
- Set up an Approval:
- Enter a descriptive Approval Name – This name will help you differentiate approvals within the contract
- Select the Approver – this could be a team or an individual user within your organization.
- Add a Description to explain what the approval is for. This description will be visible to all the approvers on the contract and it will help them understand what are the requirements to be fulfilled for this approval. (Example: "Finance team to approve the budget and payment terms for the contract")
- Choose When to Collect the Approval:
- Choose if this approval must always be collected or only on certain conditions.
- Always: The approval will be requested for every contract that uses this workflow.
- When user-defined conditions are met: The approval will be requested for every contract that uses this workflow only if the condition you define is met.
- Set Up Conditions (Optional): If you want to collect the approval based on certain conditions:
- Click the "When user-defined conditions are met" option, which will expand a form where you can define the conditions:
- Variable name: Select a variable from your workflow setup. These variables are linked to the questions you set up in the questionnaire or intake form for that workflow.
- Operator: Choose the relationship between the variable and the value (e.g., "Greater Than", "Is Equal To", etc.).
- Value: Enter the specific value you are comparing the variable to (e.g., 10000, "Finance").
- Click "Add Condition" to add another condition. You can combine multiple conditions using the AND or OR operator.
- Click the "When user-defined conditions are met" option, which will expand a form where you can define the conditions:
- Collect Approvals in Order (Optional):
- Suppose you want to collect approvals in a specific order (e.g., Finance must approve before Legal). In that case, you can use the "Collect Approvals in Order" toggle switch at the top of the "Pre-Send Approvals" section.
- When you click the "Collect Approvals in Order" toggle, you'll see that you can move approvals up or down within the list using drag and drop, allowing you to define the exact sequence you want.
- SpotDraft will ensure that approvals are requested in the order you define.
Pro tip: You can add clause-specific approvals by introducing a question in your intake form asking if a specific clause is present in the Contract & setting up a conditional approval when the response to the question is Yes.