Manage Approvals

Supported editions for this feature: Business Standard and Business Plus; Enterprise; Education Plus; G Suite Business; Essentials.  Compare your edition

Users can send documents in Google Drive through a formal approval process. Reviewers can approve, reject, or leave feedback on the documents directly within Drive, Docs, and other Google Workspace editors. You can use this process to get approval on a contract or new hire, approve changes for a document before publication, or other formal approval situations.

How it works

When a user sends a document for approval, approvers get email or Drive notifications about the request. If the user sets a due date, reviewers get email reminders that their approval is needed or past due. Users decide whether Editors are able to edit the content, leave comments or make suggestions on the document by selecting to lock the document or not. By default, documents are unlocked.

Approvers follow a link to the document where they can review, leave comments, and reject or approve the document. If a user requests approvals from multiple people, the document is approved once all reviewers approve the file. If an edit is made, all reviewers need to re-approve the latest version of the file. The file is rejected if a single reviewer rejects the file.  

When all reviewers approve the document, the file will be locked. Locked files can't be edited until they're unlocked. Unlocking the file doesn't cancel the current approval request.

For more details, see Get approvals on files in Google Drive.

Control Approvals

As an administrator, you can control how your users and files take part in the approval process.

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to Menu  AppsGoogle WorkspaceDrive and Docs.
3. Click Approvals.
4. To apply the setting to everyone, leave the top organizational unit selected. Otherwise, select a child organizational unit or a configuration group.
5. To let users outside of the organization approve documents owned by the organization, under Allow approval requests on files owned by your organization, click On.
6. To let users request approvals on files from outside of the organization, under Allow users in your organization to request approvals on files, click On.
7. Click Save. If you configured an organizational unit or group, you might be able to Inherit or Override a parent organizational unit, or Unset a group.